Roux’s mercenary employees, he knew how to deliver the spread- sheets through which Le Roux preferred to be informed. “That’s where I came in quite handy,” Klaussen said. “Because with me he could communicate.”

The days were hard but rewarding, even fun, as he developed a rapport with the Somalis. He was gratified by how many families the operation was now supporting. When he noticed that a school for girls just outside the perimeter of the compound was housed in a concrete building with no power and a metal roof, he arranged to supply electricity for fans and bottled water for the students. “I thought those kids must be dying in there,” he said. “What’s it going to cost us? Twenty bottles of water. Fuck that. Le Roux didn’t know. I didn’t tell him that he paid for it.”

At times, the contradictions of life in the compound could be jolting. An accountant Le Roux had sent from the Philippines to oversee the organization’s books spent his days posting photos to his Facebook page of himself holding weapons and driving around in the ZU-23 mounted truck. At night, the accountant slept with a teddy bear and wept for home.

When it came to the daily dissonance of Le Roux’s Somalia opera- tion, though, the most surreal moment was the sudden appearance— at Klaussen’s invitation—of a New York Times correspondent. Arriving on a flight back into Galkayo’s small airport one afternoon in the spring of 2009, Klaussen noticed a pair of white men, travel- ing with a Somali he knew named Sahal Abdulle. Klaussen struck up a conversation, and one of the men introduced himself as Jeffrey Gettleman, a reporter for the Times. Gettleman and a photographer— with Abdulle serving as their Somali translator and fixer—had been traveling around the region for a story on piracy, accompanied by a dozen armed guards. Now their flight out was grounded by mechanical difficulties, and they’d already sent away their driver and security. Klaussen offered to house them for the night in his compound, a mile and a half away. “You got three hundred guards around you, nothing can happen to you,” he said. Lacking any bet- ter options, they agreed.