0:02

This is the Popular Front podcast

0:04

with me, Jake Hanrahan. We're

0:07

focused on the niche details of

0:09

modern warfare and underreported conflict all

0:12

across the world. Popular Front

0:14

is completely independent. Today

0:17

we're speaking to journalist James

0:19

Henson Pogue. He spent

0:22

the last six months all across

0:24

Africa investigating what PMC Wagner

0:26

is up to. If you don't

0:28

already know, Wagner is the Kremlin

0:30

backed private military contractor firm, mercenaries

0:33

linked to the government in Russia.

0:35

They've been doing all sorts all

0:37

over Africa. Clearly they have a

0:39

lot planned. James Pogue was on

0:42

the ground finding out first hand.

0:45

If you want to support Popular Front

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and get a lot of

0:50

extra stuff, go to patreon.com/Popular

0:52

Front. I

1:02

think it's no real surprise to

1:04

anybody that like Wagner is kind

1:06

of digging their heels into Africa

1:08

all over the place. Everybody's

1:11

known that for quite a while. It's been following the kind

1:13

of space. Even people that have

1:15

borderline been keeping up to date with

1:17

Ukraine seem to be aware of like

1:19

Wagner now, but things are changing. What

1:22

they're doing out there is quite a

1:24

little bit different from what I understand,

1:26

especially since their boss man died in

1:28

a plane accident. Tell us about

1:30

the work you've been doing out there. What's new? What's

1:32

been going on? Where you been?

1:35

There's a kind of big question of what

1:37

Wagner is going to become

1:39

or has become in the last few, let's

1:43

say since the Pergosian events. To

1:46

start with just what I've been doing, I

1:48

was working with Granta to

1:50

go. I've

1:53

maybe talked about this on your podcast before, but

1:56

when I was young, I worked for

1:58

a logistics company. and resource exploration

2:01

company in the deserts of Mauritania,

2:03

like when I was like 21,

2:05

looking for gold, looking

2:07

for what turned out to be gold because we

2:09

were just making subsurface maps of the desert and

2:11

stuff like that. And it was right when all

2:14

of this insurgency where the former

2:16

Algerian rebels, the GSPC, became al-Qaeda

2:18

in the Islamic Maghreb. So

2:21

there were all these attacks, and like

2:23

my hotel got attacked, and

2:25

it was a big adventure in this sort of thing, right? Many

2:27

years later, I come back basically

2:31

to kind of write about the

2:33

geopolitical machinations that have begun to

2:35

take shape in countries where the

2:37

gold we were looking for got

2:39

found. And so there's this

2:41

huge thing that's happening in Africa that a lot of

2:43

people are not really paying that much attention to. People

2:46

don't pay a ton of attention to

2:48

Africa in general until something

2:51

like Wagner shows up and it starts to

2:53

become a geopolitical game that starts to get

2:55

into the papers. But

2:57

basically across this whole thing called the Sahel,

2:59

which is this semi-arid

3:02

band that separates sort of moist

3:04

equatorial Africa from the Sahara

3:06

Desert, there's been gold getting discovered

3:08

at astounding rates. And

3:11

because these are very poor areas, you have

3:13

tons of people who are just rushing out

3:15

with pneumatic picks and just going and being

3:17

prospectors. And so you have like 6 million

3:19

people are working in small-time

3:21

gold mining in Mali, which is like 10% of

3:23

the population. In Sudan, it's

3:25

probably, I mean, not even

3:27

a lot of people are working in Sudan anymore. So

3:29

in terms of like the actual amount

3:32

of employment that you're getting out of just small-time

3:34

gold mining in Sudan, it's gotta be absolutely heavy.

3:38

And so the money that people actually are

3:40

making, a lot of that is coming from

3:43

small-time gold mining. This is a huge thing

3:45

that has just swept across the continent. So

3:48

I went to go basically right about

3:50

that and to kind

3:52

of actually not write about this whole

3:54

thing of Wagner or Russia, just

3:57

feeling like that's just something that everybody's been talking

3:59

about. I wanted to do something

4:01

a little bit different. But I started off in

4:03

the Central African Republic, which

4:05

as many people will know, is

4:08

kind of the first place where

4:11

Wagner made the kind of deal that

4:15

it is attempting to make in other

4:17

places in Northwest Africa now, where

4:19

basically they agreed to pursue an

4:22

insurgency against rebels that were

4:24

fighting in the bush, basically

4:26

in exchange for access to resources.

4:30

And slowly starting in about 2018, Wagner

4:33

had been in Libya, it had been in

4:35

Sudan, it had been obviously in Syria and

4:37

Ukraine before that. But

4:40

starting in about 2018, the

4:43

Russians started to building

4:45

network of political power,

4:48

propaganda power, if you wanna call it that, they

4:50

have a radio station, a newspaper, things like that.

4:53

Everything from that to like, they built

4:55

a Russian beer company and then had

4:57

their boys firebomb the French beer company.

4:59

So that the Russian beer company would

5:01

win out in the beer wars. They

5:03

took over the country, like to a

5:05

degree that's almost indescribable unless you've been

5:08

watching it. And

5:10

basically made the Central African

5:13

Republic one of the

5:15

poorest and most dangerous and most desperate

5:17

countries on earth into a kind

5:19

of Russian colony. And

5:22

so I went there kind

5:24

of thinking like, okay, this will be my end

5:26

to a long project. I'm gonna do like, you

5:28

know, months in Africa at this point. And

5:31

I'm gonna try to figure out, you know, sort of what

5:34

the small time gold mining looks like, what

5:36

it looks like when you have armed groups

5:38

taxing it, because this happens all across Africa

5:40

now. And so we'll start with Wagner and

5:42

then move on, right? And

5:45

then I got there, actually

5:47

not having completely been aware

5:50

that there was an American

5:52

private military company and

5:54

a little

5:57

movement of, on

5:59

the diplomatic front. of an

6:01

American rapprochement with the car government,

6:03

a French rapprochement with the car

6:05

government, these kind of like little

6:08

inroads that the West was making to try

6:10

to woo this country back into the Western

6:12

orbit. And it was all sort of taking

6:14

place as a shadow game right

6:16

as I got there. And

6:19

so within three days, I was arrested and

6:21

kicked out, like detained for 10 days kicked

6:23

out of the country. And

6:26

so the first piece that kind of like, it

6:29

got a lot of attention just because it was sort of like, there

6:33

aren't that many long form things about

6:35

Wagner. I had been arrested, I

6:37

got kicked out, so there was a little adventure to

6:39

it. And so this piece kind of

6:41

took off, but it was

6:43

a kind of funny scenario where the

6:46

entire thing I reported essentially from the

6:49

terrace of a hotel where I was detained. So

6:51

you just have like, Wagner, you

6:54

know, you have like Wagner guys and diplomats

6:56

and spies and like people tracking us and

6:58

like, you know, Indian

7:01

dignitaries who were coming to think about opening diamond

7:03

mines, and everybody was just coming to like, look

7:05

at the river on the terrace. It's one hotel

7:07

I wasn't allowed to leave. And

7:10

I had like State Department security watching me,

7:13

the local cops like harassing me, like whenever we would try

7:15

to leave the hotel, they would like shove us in a

7:17

truck with guns and like take us and like try to

7:19

extort us. And

7:21

so I have this kind of like 12 day adventure. I

7:25

like seeing up close the kind of

7:27

machinations of the Russians being

7:30

very alarmed at the rapprochement that this country

7:32

was having with the West. And so they

7:34

were there, their allies within the government were

7:36

making like very clear moves. I don't know

7:38

if they were directed by Wagner or not,

7:40

but they were making clear moves to kind

7:42

of like, punish Americans,

7:46

show that Americans weren't welcome, drive them out

7:48

and kind of prove to the Russians like,

7:50

Hey, no, we're actually on your side. So

7:52

I got to see that right up close.

7:56

And then I went to Mauritania, which is sort of,

7:59

we can talk about this, in

10:00

Sudan and I don't know

10:02

what they do to them, execute them, whatever. So

10:06

you see these videos, maybe they're doctored, I

10:08

don't know. Definitely Wagner was

10:10

in Libya. The

10:13

thing that starts to get confusing goes

10:16

back to your sort of beginning question

10:19

and that again we can kind of explore is after

10:22

the Progosion coup and after Progosion's

10:25

death, there's this sort

10:27

of shift where the GRU, Russia's

10:30

like actual foreign military intelligence, they

10:33

seem to have kind of decided to take

10:35

control of these networks. And so you have

10:37

this weird kind of thing happening where in

10:40

Mali and Burkina and places like that

10:43

where Wagner has come in to

10:45

fight this long-running jihadist war that

10:47

France was fighting before and

10:50

you could say lost or abandoned or whatever.

10:55

In Mali, the Russians fighting there

10:57

will describe themselves as Wagner. In

11:01

Burkina, 200 guys

11:03

showed up in a Wagadagu

11:06

and they

11:08

are supposed to be under this new umbrella

11:11

of this thing called the Africa Corps, which

11:13

people might have heard about, sort

11:15

of like the new updated version of Wagner

11:18

in Africa. But they'll

11:20

wear Wagner patches and they still use

11:22

Wagner flags. So

11:26

it's all kind of hard to say exactly whether

11:28

it's the same organization, whether it's the same people,

11:31

certainly it's a lot of the same people,

11:33

but like who exactly is in control, it's

11:35

not always clear. It

11:37

depends country to country, like which personnel

11:40

are still in place, which personnel

11:42

have been removed. So

11:45

some of this stuff is opaque, even when you talk

11:47

to Russians who know a lot about this stuff. So

11:51

what's their main role then, would you say? Obviously

11:53

you've kind of said they're involved in this, they're involved in

11:55

that, but is there any like one

11:57

specific reason people are like going out there for it?

1:16:00

How is it? You probably

1:16:02

know it's like a southern African thing.

1:16:04

Sure. I

1:16:08

talked to him for a long time and I

1:16:11

was just sort of like, we're in a hotel

1:16:13

long way from any border or anything. It turns

1:16:15

out that his mom is like a well-known Malian

1:16:17

intelligence general and I was like, shit. I was

1:16:20

just like, I

1:16:24

texted my Malian fixer because he was trying to

1:16:26

get me in the country and he was like,

1:16:28

dude, I cannot believe that just happened. Did he

1:16:30

get your name? I was like, yeah. I was

1:16:33

just like, oh shit. He

1:16:35

was like, yeah, man, you don't understand what it is

1:16:37

like. I'm

1:16:39

saying that because with these refugees, you would

1:16:41

talk to them and I saw

1:16:44

this kid whose eyes had been stabbed out. I

1:16:47

was talking to him and I was

1:16:50

like, so why did your family come here? There's

1:16:52

no men, there's 17 women and children and him.

1:16:55

He's like 14, his eyes have been

1:16:57

stabbed out. Why is it being stabbed

1:16:59

out? Jeez, man. I

1:17:01

was like, so why did

1:17:03

you come here? He was like, oh, we just came

1:17:05

for work. I was like,

1:17:08

no, but why did you come here? He was

1:17:10

like, no, we're happy to be here. We just

1:17:13

came for work. I take care of the family.

1:17:15

You're like, oh

1:17:17

man, this

1:17:19

is almost more scary to me

1:17:21

that you won't even tell me

1:17:23

what happened than actually hearing what did

1:17:25

happen. And

1:17:28

that's that's Boggart. Like that's that's like,

1:17:30

I'm not saying it's I'm not saying

1:17:32

they personally stabbed his eyes out, but

1:17:34

whatever circumstances allowed for that village to

1:17:36

be taken and that sort of thing,

1:17:39

like that's because the

1:17:41

Russians are there and they're they're creating the space

1:17:43

to do that. They're giving the air cover, all

1:17:45

that stuff. So you see

1:17:47

it and you're like, oh man, this is this

1:17:50

is going to be long, too, because these are insurgencies.

1:17:53

I mean, France took the North of Mali before,

1:17:55

you know, it's not like, you

1:17:58

know, you can send twenty five hundred guys to

1:18:00

do something. but what's your staying power? Then you're

1:18:02

prolonging the whole thing. I

1:18:06

know that was a very long answer to the question. Well,

1:18:09

it's a very long-winded situation. This one,

1:18:11

I'm glad I got you on because

1:18:13

it's not as simple as, to

1:18:16

be honest, a lot of the reports that I

1:18:18

have read make it out to be. You know

1:18:20

what I mean? Especially if you're talking about it

1:18:23

becoming almost this proxy of east

1:18:25

versus west in

1:18:28

Africa. I think people will almost forget about the

1:18:30

people in Africa. Do you see what I'm saying?

1:18:32

Like there's so much going on and so much

1:18:34

stuff that has led to this and

1:18:36

led to the kind of easing of Wagner

1:18:38

and Russia into Africa. It's

1:18:41

absolutely, it's just heartbreaking. It's so,

1:18:43

so sad. And like, that's,

1:18:46

yeah, that's a point I keep trying to

1:18:48

like drive home, like, like pedantically almost like

1:18:50

as I've been doing this stuff, like, because

1:18:52

it's like east

1:18:55

versus west, candidly, it's not even really like just on the

1:18:57

level of like, you ask someone what

1:19:00

they're angry about and why they might be

1:19:03

happy because there's a lot of like populist, let's

1:19:06

say in a place like Burkina where

1:19:08

I was, there's a lot of populist

1:19:10

support for the new pro-Russian guy and

1:19:12

he's young and he's really, you asked

1:19:14

before, like, how do they cultivate these

1:19:16

people and how does it work? This

1:19:18

young guy, Triera, who's running Burkina Faso,

1:19:21

he is like, they have cultivated him.

1:19:23

They bring him to conferences, they fed

1:19:25

him, they are all about him. They

1:19:27

love, he is their guy. They love

1:19:30

him. They've worked really, really

1:19:32

hard to cultivate him on a personal

1:19:34

level. And he's also, as far as

1:19:36

I can tell, pretty dang popular. And so there's these dissidents

1:19:38

who are always getting arrested or disappeared.

1:19:40

And what they do is they make them join

1:19:42

the militias and go fight the jihadists on the

1:19:45

front to have like a dissident who's like 72 years

1:19:47

old, who will show, disappear for well, and

1:19:50

show up with a gun in his hand

1:19:52

and like a helmet falling off his head. But

1:19:56

just for the normal people, like they,

1:20:00

they really talk about like how

1:20:02

much they love him and how much like

1:20:04

he gives them hope because he's swept away

1:20:06

these corrupt elites this kind of almost

1:20:10

like Trumpy Brexit kind of populist

1:20:12

like we've had this system for so long

1:20:14

it hasn't paid off we're done give us

1:20:16

something else whatever it is like people forget

1:20:18

that like Africans can feel that way too

1:20:21

right um and then

1:20:23

you add this over layer of like east

1:20:25

first west it's a competition between NATO and

1:20:27

blah blah blah no one that I talked

1:20:30

to who was a normal person in Burkina

1:20:32

Faso had one fucking like

1:20:34

cared at all about NATO

1:20:36

or America they were mad

1:20:39

at France and so like

1:20:41

you have this funny thing where I would meet people who would

1:20:43

be like we're going to show you around we're going to take

1:20:45

you around like we you can come to this but you

1:20:47

know you have to make clear when we go that you're

1:20:50

not French because then

1:20:52

there might be a problem and as

1:20:54

an American you're just like wait like what

1:20:56

that you're not used to that because

1:20:58

you're used to like the whole world hates you by that

1:21:00

way yeah and so you're so

1:21:02

used to like oh you know put a Canadian

1:21:05

patch on your backpack like make sure people don't

1:21:07

think you're American yeah and like here I would

1:21:09

be speaking French and I would be like and

1:21:11

they I would be like I want

1:21:13

you to make sure you know like I'm not

1:21:16

a man I'm not French and they'd be like

1:21:18

oh cool cool cool cool yeah and we could

1:21:20

just that's how we feel about France and England

1:21:25

no I'm joking kind of well well no I'm kind

1:21:27

of I mean I had a funny thing where um

1:21:29

I had this fixer and you know he's a guy

1:21:31

who works for I don't want to say his name

1:21:33

because he's a great fixer and he's super cool

1:21:36

but I don't want to blow up his spot um

1:21:38

but he works for a bunch of the big big

1:21:40

people you know and he has for a long time

1:21:42

and he knows a lot and

1:21:44

he we were driving back we went into

1:21:46

the rural areas to see the kind of

1:21:48

like these these ad hoc militias they have

1:21:50

that fight the jihadists they're really pretty brutal

1:21:53

and have done a lot of massacres we

1:21:55

went there um and then we're

1:21:57

driving back and he was like reflecting

1:21:59

on it all this stuff, you know, and reflecting

1:22:01

on the Russia stuff and reflecting. And he was just

1:22:03

like, man, like, I have to tell you, just on

1:22:05

a personal level, like the way

1:22:08

French people treat you, like it's

1:22:10

just, they're so superior. Like, and

1:22:12

I don't, I can't explain it to you because

1:22:14

you're white, so you don't get it. And I

1:22:16

was like, dude, I, I don't get it, but

1:22:18

I, I kind of get it.

1:22:20

And he was really like, he was telling me,

1:22:22

yeah, he was like, telling all his friends later,

1:22:24

like, man, like, so this American said, like, French

1:22:27

people act superior, like even to them. That's

1:22:29

funny, man. That's so funny. I mean, in

1:22:32

England, it's almost a thing where it's like,

1:22:34

we have to hate France, but we love

1:22:36

France really. Like I fucking love France. I

1:22:38

always like, I'm always constantly like, just kind

1:22:40

of playing up to that stereotype where the

1:22:42

Brits hate France. But

1:22:44

they're like, the French are fucking cool.

1:22:46

But, but there is a big stereotype

1:22:48

like that, that is legit. Same with

1:22:51

England. I mean, our stereotype is throwing

1:22:53

plastic chairs around and like stuff like

1:22:55

that, you know, and that's real as

1:22:57

well. But I can definitely believe that

1:22:59

you're talking about combining France and journalism,

1:23:01

you're getting snootiness. Oh,

1:23:03

yeah, yeah. That's really true. And like, there's

1:23:05

just a thing like, there's just a thing

1:23:07

like where there's, you know, French people, it

1:23:10

was French people who came up with this

1:23:12

term. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not casting

1:23:14

aspersions against the French, but like, there's this

1:23:16

classic line of like, I like Africa, I

1:23:18

hate Africans, you know, and like,

1:23:20

that's wow, that's fucked up. You

1:23:22

know, there is some of that. There's there's

1:23:25

always been some of that. And like, that's

1:23:27

really dark. But

1:23:29

like the thing that, just to go

1:23:31

to the point, like, because people don't realize,

1:23:33

like, statecraft happens on this level, sometimes, like,

1:23:35

you would have these people, you'd be like,

1:23:37

okay, so why do you support Russia coming

1:23:39

into Africa? And they'd be like, well, because

1:23:41

when I apply for a visa for France,

1:23:43

and I get rejected, they don't give me

1:23:45

my money back. And you're like, dang, jeez,

1:23:47

like, right. That's, I heard

1:23:49

that like five or six times, like so

1:23:52

many times that it's not just one

1:23:54

random crazy person. It's like, this is a

1:23:56

conversation. This is a way of like, we

1:23:58

don't feel respected. say

1:30:00

Gaza or something, or Ukraine. The

1:30:02

point that I'm making is what

1:30:05

it feels like, just on a big global

1:30:07

level, is that you have a security establishment

1:30:09

that is figured out. Like, okay, we can

1:30:11

only target a couple things right now.

1:30:14

We do all the stuff in the world thing. We

1:30:16

are targeting a couple things right now. It should have

1:30:18

been bigger news that America

1:30:24

lost that drone base in Agadech

1:30:26

because that was

1:30:29

the linchpin of our

1:30:31

ability to surveil one

1:30:34

of the wildest and most difficult

1:30:36

to police regions of the entire

1:30:38

world. This sort of Sahara, Sahel

1:30:41

smuggling routes from which many, many

1:30:43

wars have spawned throughout history, from

1:30:46

which much chaos has spawned forever. And so

1:30:48

you have this frontier zone that literally the

1:30:51

West is losing eyes on, losing guys in.

1:30:54

The French intelligence networks are being dismantled. All

1:30:56

these, quote unquote, diplomats are getting kicked out

1:30:58

of these countries. So all of a sudden,

1:31:00

you're like, oh, this is just reverting to

1:31:02

a frontier that Russia's probably not

1:31:05

going to control for a long time either. And

1:31:07

so what you're going to

1:31:09

see, for example, is we

1:31:11

all know about China's big push in

1:31:13

Africa. And you go into a place

1:31:15

like Nigeria and Angola, places where it's

1:31:17

developed pretty well. Or there's infrastructure, there's

1:31:19

a history of resource development. The state

1:31:22

may be a super, super corrupt, but the state is like

1:31:25

intact and powerful. And

1:31:28

you can do these kind of things that China does where

1:31:30

you do an infrastructure deal and you're like, all right, build

1:31:32

your railroad, you give me access to

1:31:34

that sapphire mine, whatever, whatever the deal is, right?

1:31:37

As you push into more, more undeveloped

1:31:42

places, and as the Western security umbrella

1:31:44

starts to fall apart, and I'm not

1:31:47

just randomly speculating here, there's all these

1:31:49

crazy think tank papers about this. As

1:31:51

the Western security umbrella becomes less

1:31:53

powerful, you're going to have to

1:31:55

have China doing a much

1:31:58

more sophisticated thing than even viable.