Paul Barril, France's 'Supergendarme' Who Turned Mercenary, Dies at 80

Paul Barril died on Oct. 20 at his home in Antibes, France. He was 80 and had Parkinson's disease. The French interior ministry announced his death. For decades he had been known in the French press as a "supergendarme," a label earned in elite police units, and later as a man who sold security, weapons and mercenaries to governments that human rights groups considered unsavory.

The pitch he made to African leaders was blunt. Their opponents would be put under surveillance and manipulated. Newspapers would be "infiltrated." Plots against the state would be "neutralized." Omar Bongo in Gabon and Denis Sassou-Nguesso in Congo were among the heads of state who took up his services. Other clients came to Paris to shop at his Security Action Store, which sold items such as bulletproof vests and night-vision goggles, as he wrote in "The Elysee's Secret Wars" (1996), one of his six autobiographies.

Barril was born on April 13, 1946, in Vinay, in the Vercors region of southeastern France, the son and grandson of gendarmes. He grew up in the high Alps, where his father was posted. At 18 he joined the army and was assigned to a tank unit in West Berlin. He then trained at the gendarme sub-officers' school, finishing first in his class, and returned to Berlin, where one of his duties was guarding Rudolf Hess, the last Nazi war criminal held at Spandau Prison. In his first memoir, "Missions Très Spéciales" (1984), he wrote that he pitied the old man and fantasized about freeing him. In 1975 he again graduated first from the gendarmes' officer school in Melun.

He joined the GIGN, a new military police intervention unit, in 1974. Soon after Christian Prouteau helped organize it, Barril presented himself at Prouteau's office and became his second in command. Prouteau remembered him as a flamboyant, brilliant and courageous young officer who made dangerous arrests unarmed. The French press built a legend around him: a black belt in karate, a military-grade swimmer and diver, a parachutist, a hostage liberator, a policeman who worked both inside and outside the law. In 1979 he took part in the GIGN operation against Islamist militants who had seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and taken dozens hostage. After Prouteau was shot in a 1980 operation, Barril visited him in the hospital every day.

Things soured after 1982, when Barril joined President François Mitterrand's special antiterrorism unit. That year he was implicated in the Vincennes affair, accused of planting weapons and explosives in the apartment of Irish nationalists near Paris. French judicial authorities dropped the case in 2002 on legal technicalities. On French television in 2000 he said: "We did the operation. We prevented bloodshed. I don't acknowledge anything, ever." He added that he would do the same again. Twenty years after those events he was caught in another scandal from the Mitterrand years, receiving a six-month suspended sentence and a fine in 2005 for belonging to an illegal wiretapping ring that bugged dozens of politicians, actors, journalists and union leaders.

He left the gendarmerie in 1984 and founded Secrets, a mercenary-security company whose name is a French acronym for Security Equipment Planning and Realization Company. A 2021 book on Françafrique, the web of official and unofficial military, financial and political ties between France and its former colonies, called him and a former gendarmerie colleague "emblematic figures" of that system, serving despotic governments in Africa and the Middle East under the forgiving eye of French security services. The book says that in 1990 he recruited 15 mercenaries to teach Gabon's police to use tear gas on demonstrators.

His ties to Rwanda's Hutu government brought the heaviest scrutiny. In 2013, the Human Rights League of France, Survie and the International Federation for Human Rights accused him of complicity in genocide for supplying weapons and training. French magistrates investigated for years but never charged him. Barril did not deny being in Rwanda during the genocide, in which close to one million Tutsis were murdered. A search of his company's Paris offices turned up a May 1994 contract signed by him and the Rwandan prime minister, committing him to supply 20 men for training, two million cartridges, shells, mortars and grenades for a fee of $3.13 million. The deal violated the United Nations arms embargo. Human Rights Watch said Rwanda paid him $1.2 million in June 1994. Paul Kagame's Tutsi-dominated rebel force entered Kigali on July 4, 1994, and halted the killing before the contract was fully carried out. Six years later Barril said on television that three million had died in the war and called the accepted account "the greatest historical lie ever."

He hinted to investigators that he acted under indirect direction from Mitterrand's administration, which was allied with the Hutu government. Prouteau rejected this: Barril had no mission, he said, and after leaving the gendarmerie never held a mandate from France. "He passed from the light to the darkness," Prouteau said. He also said Barril made a considerable fortune working for, among others, the emir of Qatar, until illness struck in the early 2010s. Barril is survived by his wife, Angélique, and his son, Patrick. Whether the French state had any hand in his Rwanda work remains an open question, one his death leaves unanswered.