NAIROBI, Kenya – Responding to accusations by United Nations investigators that he violated an international arms embargo, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide and a prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump, denied having played any role in a US mercenary operation. $ 80 million in Libya in 2019. And he insisted that the main conclusions of the UN investigation were totally wrong.
“Erik Prince did not violate an arms embargo and had nothing to do with sending aircraft, drones, weapons or people to Libya – period,” he said in an interview with The New York Times.
A confidential report submitted on Thursday to the UN Security Council and obtained by The Times accused Prince of violating a decade-old arms embargo on Libya by participating in an ill-fated 2019 mercenary operation that sought to support a powerful Libyan commander in his effort to overthrow Libya’s internationally supported government.
Prince, who came under international scrutiny after his Blackwater contractors massacred 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, has been a prominent supporter of Trump in recent years. His sister, Betsy DeVos, was Mr. Trump’s secretary of education.
Speaking on the phone, Prince defied important statements in the UN report, attacked critics and minimized his ties to the former president. He said he met Trump only once as president, at a Veterans Day event, and never discussed Libya or any other political issue with him.
“I was not a foreign policy adviser to the president,” he added, apparently in reference to media articles using that description. “Then stop characterizing me like that. Is not true.”
Mr. Prince and his lawyer acknowledged that they did not see the UN report, or the many specific allegations listed in it, which include dozens of pages of PowerPoint presentations, contracts, bank transfers, text messages and other evidence. And Mr. Prince did not offer any concrete evidence to contest these allegations.
Gregg Smith, who worked with Prince between 2014 and 2016 and is cited in the report, said the mercenary operation described by researchers in Libya had many similarities to a project that Prince led in South Sudan in 2014.
“It’s the same people and the same aircraft,” said Smith.
Prince’s widespread denials raise the stakes on the confidential report, which is currently on the Security Council and is due to be made public next month. The report opens up the possibility that Prince could be punished by freezing assets and banning travel, although such sanctions are rarely imposed by the United Nations.
A central charge of the report is that Prince presented the $ 80 million mercenary scheme to Libyan militia commander Khalifa Hifter during a meeting in Cairo in April 2019, just days after Hifter launched a broad military campaign to seize the capital of Libya, Tripoli.
Mr. Prince insisted that it was impossible. “I never met General Hifter,” he said. “I wasn’t in Egypt in 2019. I never even spoke to the man.”
The report said the meeting coincided with an abrupt change in the Trump administration’s approach to Libya.
The day after the meeting described in the report, on April 15, Trump made a call to Hifter and publicly acknowledged his “significant role in combating terrorism and protecting Libya’s oil resources,” the White House said in a statement in The Hour. .
Four days later, Trump surprised his aides by openly endorsing Hifter’s advance in Tripoli, in what represented a drastic reversal in American policy towards Libya. Before that, the United States supported the government that Hifter was trying to overthrow.
Mr Prince says he tried to influence the president only through newspaper articles, where in 2017 in The Financial Times he proposed a private frontier force to curb illegal migration from Libya and in The Wall Street Journal suggested a force of contractors to fight in Afghanistan. “I wish he heard it,” said Prince. “I wish he had heard the advice I gave him in the articles.”
Prince also said he had never discussed Libya with two other figures close to Trump: Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law and adviser, and Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state.
The mercenary operation linked to Mr. Prince by the UN report is just the last episode to highlight the role of foreign forces in the chaotic war that engulfed Libya after its longtime dictator, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, was deposed during the Arab spring 2011 period.
The United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia, Egypt and other countries took sides in the struggle, sending money, fighters and powerful weapons in an attempt to influence the future of the oil-rich nation of North Africa.
Hifter, who controls most of eastern Libya, is probably the country’s most powerful commander. He faced harsh international criticism in April 2019, when he began his campaign to capture Tripoli with the support of the Emirates and, later, Russian mercenaries.
UN investigators say a team of 20 British, Australian, South African and American mercenaries was secretly sent to Libya in June 2019 as part of a $ 80 million scheme to help Hifter, then in his campaign to capture Tripoli. .
The mercenaries arrived with smuggled military aircraft and boats from South Africa and Europe and offered to form an attack squadron to locate and assassinate Hifter’s main enemy commander, the report said.
But the operation hit an obstacle when Jordan refused to sell American-made Cobra helicopters to mercenaries. Then it became a disaster when a dispute with Hifter forced the mercenaries to flee Libya by boat across the Mediterranean.
At that time, says Prince, he was in the mountains of Wyoming and later on a trip to Alaska and Canada with his son.
“It is difficult to conduct a mercenary operation from the interior of the northern Yukon Territory,” he said.
The UN report says that Prince transferred three of his own planes to Libya for use in Hifter’s war campaign.
Investigators say a paper trail took them from Prince-controlled companies in Bermuda, Bulgaria and the United States that owned the planes to the Libyan battlefield.
Mr. Prince stumbled on his explanation of his companies. Prince’s lawyer contradicted him when Prince said he was the owner of Bridgeporth, a British research firm that UN investigators said was used to provide coverage for Prince’s military ventures.
He does not know or care who bought the planes that ended up in Libya, he said.
And he said he refused to cooperate with United Nations investigators – a group of six people with knowledge about illicit weapons and financial transfers formally known as the Expert Panel – because he believed they intended to defame him. “There is no legal process,” he said. “It’s a hatchet job.”
A Western official said UN investigators had already formally recommended sanctions against a friend and former business partner of Prince for his participation in the mercenary scheme.
Now, Prince, facing a battle for his reputation at least at the United Nations, said he was the victim of a dark and secret image that he himself had cultivated for a long time.
“My name has become a click bait for people who like to weave conspiracy theories together,” said Prince. “And if my name is put, it always draws attention. And it’s very disgusting. “