12/10/2026
Far-right Trump donor Erik Prince has been fighting a secret war in Congo with his private army, and it came out last month when an ambush wounded Fox News regular and ex-Green Beret Tim Kennedy and killed one of Prince’s soldiers from New Zealand.
Prince, the Blackwater founder whose guards gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, is now negotiating a new $200 million deal with Congo while Kennedy recovers at Walter Reed, the hospital built for active-duty troops.
A new investigation by The New York Times, built on interviews with officials on three continents, contractors and some of Prince’s own employees, lays out what he’s been doing there. In late 2024 he signed a five-year security and mining deal with President Félix Tshisekedi worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
His contractors have flown drones against the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels from an airfield in Kalemie, a lakeside town on Lake Tanganyika. Reuters reported in February that his people helped Congolese special forces retake the city of Uvira.
The highlands went badly. Several Colombian contractors died in fighting in early September. On Sept. 17 a second team, riding with Congolese troops in the Minembwe Highlands, walked into an ambush.
Congo sits on the cobalt the world’s batteries need. Last December the Trump administration signed a deal giving American mining companies preferential access, an arrangement some Congolese officials privately describe as trading peace for minerals.
Prince gave $250,000 to a Trump campaign, and his sister Betsy DeVos ran Trump’s Education Department. In a 2024 podcast he said the US should “put the imperial hat back on” in Africa, and he agreed he was promoting a new colonialism.
He’s been selling the same package in Latin America. In March 2025, Ecuador’s president Daniel Noboa announced a “strategic alliance” with Prince to fight drug gangs. A few weeks later Prince showed up in Guayaquil next to about 500 soldiers and police on a raid in the Portete district.
He used the cameras to campaign for Noboa days before the April runoff, telling Ecuadorians the alternative was turning into a Venezuela-style narco-state. Noboa won, and by July his government had hired Prince to train the country’s police and military.
Americans have paid for this man before. Blackwater went from about $200,000 in federal contracts in 2001 to roughly $1 billion by 2007, much of it guarding State Department officials in Iraq.
A House Oversight report that year found the company billed $1,222 a day per guard, about $445,000 a year, which staff estimated at six to nine times the cost of an Army sergeant doing the same job.
The same report counted 195 Blackwater shooting incidents since 2005, with the company firing first about 80% of the time, even though its contract allowed only defensive force.
When a drunk Blackwater contractor killed an Iraqi vice president’s bodyguard on Christmas Eve 2006, the State Department helped get him out of Iraq and talked the payment to the guard’s family down to $15,000.
“Privatizing is working exceptionally well for Blackwater,” Rep. Henry Waxman said at the hearing.
On Sept. 16, 2007, Blackwater guards escorting a US embassy convoy opened fire with machine guns and gr***de launchers in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. The youngest of the 17 dead was a 9-year-old boy named Ali Kinani. A federal jury convicted four of the guards in 2014, and Trump pardoned all four in December 2020.
Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the book on Blackwater and went on to co-found The Intercept, reported in 2009 on sworn statements two former insiders filed in federal court in Virginia.
One alleged Prince saw himself as a Christian crusader out to rid the world of Islam.
The other said men he sent to Iraq used call signs taken from the Knights Templar.
Those claims were never proven in court, but Prince hasn’t exactly run from the theme; last fall he was a featured speaker at CPAC’s summit on Christian persecution, held at the Kennedy Center.
The results haven’t matched the swagger. His men fled Libya by speedboat in 2019 after a falling-out with the warlord paying them, and UN investigators accused his forces of breaking an arms embargo on Somalia. Sean McFate, a former private military contractor now at the Atlantic Council, told the Times that other mercenaries mock Prince for never having a successful mission.
Zobel Behalal, who studies mercenaries in Congo, says the outsourcing exposes how weak the army is, and that ordinary Congolese pay the price while foreigners get rich.
In January, Prince sat down with Belgium’s top Africa diplomat at the US ambassador’s residence in Brussels. He wanted two favors: help getting his drones released from Dutch customs, and approval to ship Belgian guns and am******on to Congo.
Belgium said no to both.
Prince said on that podcast he wanted a new colonialism, and in Congo he’s running one on the old model, with his company guarding mines and chasing tax money for a government that can’t defend itself.
The East India Company had a royal charter. Prince has a contract with Kinshasa and a sister who sat in Trump’s cabinet, and when one of his men got shot, a US military hospital took him in.
The contract money goes to Prince. The families in the Minembwe Highlands, who never signed anything, are still living in the war zone.
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