NAIROBI, Kenya – Erik Prince, the former head of security contractor Blackwater Worldwide and a prominent defender of former President Donald J. Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo in Libya by sending arms to a militia commander who was trying to overthrow the country government supported, according to UN researchers.
A confidential UN report obtained by The New York Times and delivered by investigators to the Security Council on Thursday reveals how Mr. Prince sent a force of foreign mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, gunboats and cyber warfare capabilities, to eastern Libya at the height of a major battle in 2019.
As part of the operation, which the report said cost $ 80 million, the mercenaries also planned to form an attack squad that could track and kill selected Libyan commanders.
Mr. Prince, a former Navy SEAL and brother of Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s secretary of education, became a symbol of the excesses of the privatized American military force when his Blackwater contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.
In the past decade, he has relaunched himself as an executive who closes deals – sometimes for minerals, other times involving military force – in countries confused by war but rich in resources, mainly in Africa.
During the Trump administration, Mr. Prince was a generous donor and a staunch ally of the president, often in league with figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, in an attempt to undermine Trump’s criticism. And Mr. Prince was investigated in the Trump-Russia inquiry into his meeting with a Russian banker in 2017.
Mr Prince refused to cooperate with the UN inquiry; his lawyer did not answer questions about the report. Last year, the lawyer, Matthew L. Schwartz, told the Times that Prince “had absolutely nothing” to do with military operations in Libya.
The report raises the question of whether Prince played in his ties with the Trump administration to conduct the operation in Libya.
He describes how a friend and ex-partner of Prince traveled to Jordan to buy American-made Cobra helicopters from the Jordanian army – a sale that would normally require permission from the American government, according to military experts. The friend assured Jordanian officials that he had “authorization from everywhere” and that his team’s work had been approved “at the highest level”, the report found.
But Jordanians, unimpressed by these claims, stopped the sale, forcing mercenaries to purchase new aircraft from South Africa.
A Western official, speaking to the Times on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss confidential work, said the investigators also obtained telephone records showing that Prince’s friend and former partner made several calls to the White House telephone exchange in late July 2019, after the mercenary operation had problems.
The charge that Prince violated the UN arms embargo on Libya exposes him to possible UN sanctions, including banning travel and freezing bank accounts and other assets – although such a result is uncertain.
Mr. Prince is not the only one accused of violating a decade-old arms embargo on Libya. The rampant intrusion of regional and global powers has fueled years of struggle, attracting mercenaries and other explorers in search of the riches of a war that has brought only death and misery to many Libyans.
The sheer breadth of evidence in the latest UN report – 121 pages of codenames, cover stories, offshore bank accounts and secret arms transfers spanning eight countries, not to mention the brief appearance of a Hollywood friend from Prince – provides a glimpse of what secret world of international mercenaries.
Libya began to fragment a decade ago, when the violent overthrow of the country’s longtime dictator, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, unleashed a political crisis that divided the country into armed factions, many of them eventually supported by foreign powers in the hope shaping the fate of the oil-rich nation of North Africa.
Eastern Libya is now in the hands of Khalifa Hifter, the powerful militia commander Prince has agreed to support, according to the report, while the country was being devastated by the fighting in 2019.
A former CIA agent who returned from exile in Virginia after the fall of Qaddafi in 2011, Hifter quickly established himself in the eastern city of Benghazi as an aspiring strongman who was determined to make way for power if necessary.
Nearly 70 years old, Hifter relied for years on the United Arab Emirates for funding, armed drones and a range of powerful weapons, according to successive United Nations reports. More recently, Mr. Hifter also received support from Russia, under the guise of mercenaries, from the Wagner Group linked to the Kremlin, which has become an integral part of his war machine.
In April 2019, Hifter launched a violent attack on the capital, Tripoli, but formidable obstacles stood in his way, including troops recently arrived from Turkey in support of the UN-backed government. Then Mr. Hifter turned to Mr. Prince.
Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.