work out. Lucky I didn't kill him." They were soon joined by a pair of colleagues from Le Roux's security team, a doughy Brit and an Australian, the latter of whom spent much of his time blitzed on a mix of illegally imported booze and orange Valium tablets bought at a local market. He liked to call himself "Agent Orange."

It was a motley team, but Klaussen had little choice but to at- tempt to mold it into a competent organization. His days were spent navigating a culture that was utterly foreign to him. "I had daily meetings with elders, people from the area, neighbors, every- thing. You've got to keep everybody happy," he said. "It's not, 'I'm here and I've got money, you are going to do what I say.' It doesn't work like that." Liban, his local point man, had organized an ini- tial security force of several dozen fighters, answering only to Klaussen. But given the environment, he was going to need more. As the months wore on, the payroll would come to include hun- dreds of Somalis. The larger the operation, the more they feared catching the attention of al-Shabaab, the Islamic militant group, or other hostile forces. "The word started getting out that there was a foreign company in that area of Somalia spending a lot of money, giving a lot of people jobs," Klaussen said. "Everybody needed something, everybody needed a piece of the cake. And the extrem- ists start thinking about it, and we became a target."

Klaussen's team, with the help of Liban, purchased guns in the local market for their expanding defense force—cheap Chinese knockoff AK-47s flowing in from Ethiopia. In May 2009, just a few months after telling Klaussen he needed to make the opera- tion self-sufficient, Le Roux emailed detailed instructions on how to manage its security:

1. You should setup a small workshop in the house and buy a welding machine and "up armour" the vehicles with steel plates in the doors of the cab

2. I suggest you get sandbags and deploy them on the balcony and roof and create firing positions

3. Even with the upgrades u requested below, u are still lightly