EXCLUSIVE: Erik Prince's Love Letter to "Europe's Last Dictator"
Blackwater Founder + Trump Donor Sought Belarus Arms Deal from Putin Ally
Armed conflict makes for strange bedfellows.
Take, for example, Erik Prince. Mr. Prince is America’s best-known mercenary and a well-heeled member of the country’s political donor class. Mr. Prince paints himself as a patriot, a defender of American liberty, and one of America’s sons. He likes to tell a story of celebrating his seventh birthday in 1976 in East Berlin during a family vacation to Europe. There, amid heavy weaponry, military dogs, and minefields, he noticed how the communist government used its forces to keep its citizens from fleeing to democratic West Germany during the Cold War. The experience was a formidable moment in his youth, part of his lifelong appreciation of Western democracy and liberty.
His biography certainly supports the image: an alum of the conservative Christian Hillsdale College, a former Navy SEAL, founder of Blackwater, and an heir to a Michigan automotive fortune. His family’s wealth bought political influence, which, in turn, has ensured his access to and benefit from the last three Republican administrations. During the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Prince grew Blackwater from an unthinkable premise into a private military behemoth, part of the U.S. government’s arsenal during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Prince later made six-figure donations in 2016 to help elect Donald J. Trump, and his sister, Betsy Devos, served as the Trump Administration’s education secretary.
Wealth and pedigree, by Prince’s account, have given him a clear purpose: to spread freedom and liberty both in the U.S. and overseas.
But the business of war makes having principles difficult. And as it turns out, his road to making a fortune through war has consistently run through foreign autocrats, dictators, and tyrants. The question is how far this American patriot will go to make his own fortune as a war profiteer.
Enter Belarus President Alexandr Lukashenko. “I am the last dictator in Europe,” he once said, leaving no doubt the strongman self-identified as a tyrant.
As Russia’s war in neighboring Ukraine grinds on for a second year, Mr. Lukashenko has been precisely the pliant and subservient leader Russian president Vladimir Putin wants in Ukraine. Mr. Lukashenko went so far as to allow Russian forces to invade Ukraine from Belarus to begin the war. Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Lukashenko regularly jails critics and political opponents, holding rigged elections while extending his reign. He has been in power since 1994 with no signs of stepping down. His most recent election victory came in 2020, despite losing to the wife of a blogger he arrested for the crime of running against him.
Shortly after Mr. Lukashenko stole the August 2020 election, Mr. Prince may have answered the question of how far he would go to make a war fortune and build a private army in a letter to Belarus’ leader. Belarus was then sitting on one of only two remaining weapons caches from the Soviet Union, a potentially lucrative resource for supplying or reinforcing conflicts worldwide. The letter, dated September 6, 2020, seeks Mr. Lukashenko’s permission to buy significant amounts of the country’s Soviet arms, according to a copy obtained by The Cole Report. The letter explains that Mr. Prince and associates intended to partner with Belarus’ defense industry through a joint venture with a top Belarussian arms producer to extend the life of the decaying armaments and production facilities.
When the letter was sent to Mr. Lukashenko, mass protests had erupted in Belarus’ capital, Minsk, during the weeks following the election. He ordered the country’s security services to suppress peaceful demonstrations for democracy. Mr. Lukashenko’s forces killed several unarmed protestors and detained hundreds more. The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union rejected Lukashenko’s victory as fraudulent and denounced the elections as neither free nor fair.
But Prince, according to the letter, saw the situation differently.
“Your leadership,” the letter says, “has brought peace, stability, and prosperity to your country.”
Mr. Prince’s signature and that of his business partner Michael Yudelson appear on the letter. The letter represents that they are from a Cyprus-based company called Defense Export Limited, which Mr. Yudelson owns. The letter is dated roughly three months after Mr. Prince had traveled to Belarus to inspect weapons, according to a source and Belarus government documents reviewed by The Cole Report. A source with direct knowledge of Mr. Prince’s June 2020 trip to Belarus provided the letter to Mr. Lukashenko on the condition they remain anonymous. The source fears physical retaliation from the Belarusian government because they claimed the document came from Lukashenko’s presidential office.
In December, The Cole Report contacted Mr. Prince’s lawyer, quoting from the letter and seeking comment. The lawyer, Matthew Schwartz, acknowledged the inquiry and said he would respond after “looking into it.” Mr. Schwartz did not respond again, despite three subsequent requests for comment and additional questions about the letter's contents. For his part, Mr. Yudelson denies that he had anything to do with the letter and said his company, DTX, did not try to purchase weapons in Belarus in 2020. Mr. Yudelson said he was unaware that Mr. Prince had traveled to Belarus looking to purchase weapons. The Belarus foreign ministry and Washington DC embassy declined to comment on the letter.
In business, the saying goes, timing is everything. Five days before the letter to Mr. Lukashenko, a U.N. human rights panel of experts denounced Belarusian security services for violating Belarussian protestors’ human rights. “We are extremely alarmed at the hundreds of allegations of torture and other ill-treatment in police custody,” the panel said. The U.N. panel decried what they described as the violence against women and children, including sexual abuse and rape with rubber batons.”
Despite Mr. Lukashenko’s violence and repression against a civilian uprising, Mr. Prince apparently sought an opportunity to corner the market on Soviet-era munitions for a private military enterprise. He viewed Mr. Lukashenko’s violent effort to hold on to power as the strongman saw it:
“We truly hope that your citizens will realize this in time, and that the current commotions will calm down, so that you will be able to continue your great work. We salute you!”
A “Shit Ton” of Bullets
Specifically, the September 6 letter asked for Mr. Lukashenko’s permission to buy 50 million bullets—roughly $25 million in value—from the country’s Soviet-era stockpile. The ammunition, 7.62 x 39-millimeter gauge, is used for Soviet-made AK-47s. Mr. Prince, according to the letter, appeared to already have buyers in mind. The weaponry would go on to “foreign private military companies” conducting military operations in “various regions of the world, based on instructions from foreign governments,” according to the letter.
The proposal was ambitious, if not revolutionary. The letter informed Lukashenko that they were creating a joint venture with one of Belarus's military manufacturers, BVST, to arm, supply, and train these unnamed mercenary companies. In addition to buying bullets, according to the letter, Mr. Prince also sought to become a producer. Mr. Prince’s new venture would repair and upgrade Belarussian defense manufacturing facilities to produce,
“aircraft bombs, aircraft guided and unguided missiles, anti-tank systems and missiles,” according to the letter.
Bill Kullman, an attorney, who worked at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) for 20 years, including as a senior legal advisor and a small arms expert, said 50 million bullets was a “shit ton.” The letter, Kullman said, raised several questions about the legal consequences for the Blackwater founder. “Every U.S. citizen has to register as a broker with State Department, and a license would have to be issued” even if the arms are neither made nor shipped to the U.S. Kullman, who now consults for the U.N. about weapons policy, said of the letter bearing Mr. Prince’s signature:
“It looks pretty bad.”
Mr. Prince wanted to use the same approach to Belarus’ aging arms industry as his father, Edgar, used in the automotive business four decades earlier: verticalization. The letter reveals an effort by the younger Prince to own the entire supply chain of Russian-designed and manufactured weapons from production to shipment, deep inside Russia’s sphere of influence. Part of the popularity of Russian weapons is that they are less regulated than NATO and US-manufactured arms. For decades Soviet-era arms proliferation has been the oxygen for small wars in countries and regions which lack large conventional militaries. As the letter laid out in the letter, the plan was to have supplied so-called shadow wars, where mercenaries and proxies fight. Conflicts such as those in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen—all conflicts Mr. Prince has sought to influence, supply, or profit from. Two former senior military officers—one American and one Russian—told me Mr. Prince could have made a fortune as a kind of eBay for dictators from Africa to the Arab Gulf.
Prince has a history of sidling up to people close to Putin, merging his personal business interests with his self-professed patriotism. In January 2017, Prince flew to a secret conference held in the Seychelles islands, an Indian Ocean country. There, Mr. Prince met secretly with one of Putin’s top emissaries, a finance executive who ran a sanctioned Russian sovereign wealth fund. The Mueller report into Russia’s 2016 election interference later determined that although Mr. Prince told Congress it was a chance meeting, it was, in fact, pre-arranged to help establish a communications back channel between Putin and the incoming Trump administration. FBI notes of Mr. Prince’s interview with the Mueller investigation show that the Russian executive expressed his desire for normalized relations between Washington and Moscow. In response, Mr. Prince said:
“if Roosevelt could work with Stalin to defeat the Nazis then Trump and Putin could work together to fight terrorism.”
The setting for the 2017 back-channel meeting, though, is even more critical to understanding the aspirations hinted at in the Lukashenko letter three years later. Mr. Prince flew to Seychelles at the invitation of the United Arab Emirates leader, Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ. Under MBZ’s direction, the UAE hired Prince almost a decade earlier to build a mercenary force for the country but had fallen out of favor as a military advisor there. With Trump newly elected and his family politically important to Trump, Mr. Prince sought to cash in again with the Gulf leader. “Prince was like a kid at Christmas about his meeting with MBZ; he could only focus on the presents under the tree,” according to the FBI’s notes of Mr. Prince’s interview.
Then, as in 2020, Mr. Prince’s international stature came from his perceived proximity to the Trump White House. During much of the Trump administration, while his sister served in the cabinet, Mr. Prince was an unofficial advisor to the White House, working with Jared Kushner on foreign policy in the Middle East and Africa, according to four people familiar with their relationship. (Mr. Kushner denies having any ties to Mr. Prince).
The 2020 proposal to Mr. Lukashenko is ambiguous on several key issues. Who was paying for the mercenaries? For which conflicts? Did the Trump White House know of the approach to Belarus? For Mr. Prince, there is a central question for an aspiring international arms dealer: Does the ex-Navy SEAL have the required U.S. government license to broker or sell weapons?
Mr. Prince’s wealth and influence have afforded him many things, but a crystal ball capable of seeing the not-too-distant future is not among them.
If he had one, he might not have added this sign-off in the letter to the Belarus tyrant:
“On a personal note, we would like to point out that, although there are many forms of government throughout the world, there is no one fits all system, we truly believe, your style of government has proven itself very effective for your great nation and its fine people.”
[Full disclosure: Erik Prince is suing me and The Intercept, my former employer, alleging an article I wrote defamed him. The April 2020 article reported that Mr. Prince met with Russian leaders of Wagner, Moscow’s shadow army of mercenaries, seeking to do business with the Western-sanctioned group in Africa. Federal judges dismissed Mr. Prince’s first complaints over the article. The current suit is his third attempt. The Intercept and I stand by the story.]
Nice opening piece. Erik was also working for Michael D’Andrea (aka Michael Leland Kettenbach, The Undertaker, Dark Prince) who ran PMCs, IO and covert election Ops for Koch/Adelson-GOP.
We haven't seen the end of proxy-war actors.
Belarus is going to be used to attack Lithuania using the same Russian speaker pretext as they did in Ukraine. If NATO gets involved, Belarus will nuke to deescalate and London/Washington will have to decide whether to use a nuke to retaliate, at risk of getting nuked themselves, or back off. I wrote about it earlier this week.