Dispatches From Exile Weekly Mind Dump, 7/16-7/22, 2023: Using Soldiers of Fortune to Achieve Your Foreign Policy Goals is Always a Bad Idea
Putin and Prigozhin - Mercenaries as business partners: You dance with the devil who brung you.
Vladimir Putin’s hot-cold relationship with Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin would require a team of shrinks to even begin to grasp. That’s often how it is with thug-bro’s.
This week Prigozhin assured his fighters that they would be redeployed, including on a “new journey to Africa.” He emphasized to African media, “There was no, and there will be no, reduction in our programs in Africa.”
A friend of mine hit the nail on the head: “Putin’s relationship with Prigozhin reminds me a bit like that of Castro and Che Guevara. When Che became too much of a headache to manage inside Cuba, Fidel ‘agreed’ to let him export revolution from bases abroad — first Angola, then Bolivia. Keep your enemies closer, but keep your problematic, frustrated ‘friends’ at arms-length; better yet, elsewhere.”
And look how that worked out for Che.
Making shady deals with soldiers of fortune to achieve your foreign policy goals is always a bad idea. It’s Faustian, immoral and uncontrollable.
The developing world has been the traditional playground for mercenaries — sociopaths with a penchant for mischief and a lust for adventure. The most infamous in modern times was Bob Denard, a former French naval man who from the early 1960s through the mid-’90s wreaked havoc in Africa and the Middle East. He was a swashbuckling gun-for-hire who, for the right price, would launch a coup or eliminate one’s enemies with his merry band of white French, Belgian and South African cutthroats. Prigozhin may have picked up and taken to heart one of Denard’s bons mots: “The rule in this business is that there are no contracts, so when you’re in a situation where everything turns against you, it’s very rewarding.”
I’ve known my share of such people in my Foreign Service career, particularly in Thailand in the mid-’80s when I was chief of the U.S. Consulate in Udorn Thani, in the northeast. My job was mainly to follow and report on three guerrilla wars: in Laos, Cambodia and the domestic Thai communist insurgency. My assignment can best be described as The Consul’s File meets Indiana Jones meets Apocalypse Now!
It was the Wild East in those days. Shortly before my arrival at post, a man’s body was hanging from a tree on an islet in the reservoir opposite my residence — a thief and victim of vigilante justice by the local cops. They kindly acceded to our request to take the corpse down.
All manner of foreign adventurers, fugitives, washed-out military, soldiers of fortune and other assorted transnational miscreants gravitated to my district in those days. One was the infamous Anthony “Tony Po” Poshepny, a working class Hungarian-Pennsylvanian who was the inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! Beefy, bald and just as crazy as Brando’s character, Poshepny, a Vietnam vet, was known for cutting off the ears and heads of Viet Cong, which he preserved in jars in his hut, as well as hurling POW’s out of flying helicopters. If anybody should have been tried for war crimes from that conflict, it was Tony Po. He died, typically of his kind, of complications from alcoholism.
Other memorable misfits included POW/MIA raiders — ex-U.S. military who tried to launch illegal cross-border raids into Laos in search of phantom American POW’s. Yes, sort of real-life Rambos, but with a farcical twist. Bo Gritz stood out among these Walter Mitty’s. Subject for my memoir. . .
Anyway — ah, yes. Mercenaries.
So, one day, a foreigner arrived at the consulate asking to meet me. He told my staff that he was a Belgian “seeking information.” Ushered into my office was a short fire plug of a man with trim mustache and a military bearing. He reached out his hand and, smiling, said,
“Hello. I’m Jimmy.”
I invited him to take a seat.
“Jimmy who?”
“Jimmy the Belgian. That’s what I call myself.”
“Okay. What can I do for you?”
After a meandering, evasive chat going nowhere, I asked him to get to the point. “Jimmy” gradually loosened up and stated that he was in Udorn Thani to take a break from fighting in Burma. He’d been training Karen rebels. He added that he also trained anti-government Lao insurgents and had served “around the world in various capacities” and would be pleased to share information with me.
U.S. diplomats don’t have the choice to hob-nob with whomever they wish. The State Department actually maintains a list of enemy countries and movements with whose nationals we are forbidden to associate. While warriors-for-hire aren’t explicitly listed, we are expected to use our best judgment as to who will not sully the flag by association and those who could stain it.
One surrenders one’s passport when entering a U.S. diplomatic post. My staff copied “Jimmy’s.” A passport provides a wealth of information with which to conduct an investigation.
“Jimmy” was actually Guillaume Vogeleer, 48, native of Brussels, married to a Thai woman, owner of a bar in Pattaya. Further digging revealed he was an ex-Belgian army commando, fought with Bob Denard in the Katanga secession conflict in the ‘60s, served as a bodyguard for actress Jacqueline Bisset as well as, intriguingly, for assassinated Chilean president Salvador Allende. The latter raised the biggest red flag for me. Did he fail in his duty? Or, sold out and enabled Allende’s murder?
I kept a distance from Vogeleer from that time onward. He was actually a charming, funny man whose harsh bruxellois reminded me of Québécois. But he showed up one day insisting on seeing me. I relented. With a big smile and a hearty laugh, he announced he wished to present me with a gift: an old British Enfield rifle from Burma. I politely declined.
Fast-forward to 1999: “Jimmy” died at age 62 — you guessed it — of complications from alcoholism.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is cut from the same khaki as all mercenaries. He’s reckless, fearless, unfaithful, avaricious, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking and blood-stained. Make bargains with such folks at your own risk.
“Jimmy’s” compatriots have a saying:
Le serviteur du diable fait plus que ce qui est demandé.
The servant of the devil does more than is asked for.
Vladimir Putin has learned this the hard way.
All your posts are great, but this was particularly good. Thanks!
I knew Jimmy very well as a friend.... he was the type you definitely would want next to you should a fight erupt. I watched him literally "dismantle" a German tourist who had the audacity to belittle Belgium in Jimmy's old place, the Madrid. I once was told to be extremely careful around him... that he could be very dangerous when drinking, to which I replied.. "You're wrong, He's dangerous all the time" . It was sad to watch him decline in his last year although he did mellow a bit and became a lot more introspective. He had his demons, for sure. To me, he was someone who seemed to be always on the outside looking in. I valued his friendship, nevertheless, and still think of him fondly.