Leaked documents reveal how military contractors linked to Israeli intelligence secretly trained a special operations strike force in mineral-rich eastern Congo.
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Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak coordinated closely with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in pursuit of mineral, oil, and gas resources in Africa after Barak’s resignation as Israel’s defense minister in 2013, according to documents published by the U.S. Department of Justice and hacked emails from Barak’s Gmail account reviewed by Drop Site News.
Epstein played a pivotal role in Barak’s transition from the military to the private sector by packaging privatized Israeli intelligence services for sale to police states around the world. Together, the two men marketed security and surveillance products to foreign governments seeking to stabilize civil conflicts during the tumultuous early 2010s.
Email correspondence shows that Barak also drew on his lifelong Israeli intelligence connections to help expand his business footprint in Africa, including the services of former Mossad chief turned private military contractor Danny Yatom. Yatom served as director of the Mossad from 1996 to 1998, and became Barak’s top security adviser, followed by time in the Knesset until 2008. Since then, he has consulted for and served on the boards of various private security firms such as Global Strategic Group, a small outfit operating in central Africa led by several Israeli intelligence veterans from the Mossad and Shin Bet.
A proposal for a “Night Warfare Special Operations Unit” that was included in Barak’s Gmail account reveals that Global Strategic Group trained an elite special operations unit in the mineral-rich eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2013. The proposal, marked “classified,” included a case study of the Kivu conflict in which Yatom boasted that their firm’s training had turned the tide against the rebel March 23 Movement (M23) and ended the war.
The Congo case study and other communications from Barak’s inbox showing his contacts with Epstein and Yatom were published by non-profit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets, as part of a series of document dumps from Handala, a hacking group with suspected ties to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The cache has been independently vetted and verified by Drop Site News.
Yatom, who has denied that he ever met Epstein, did not respond to a request for comment. Aside from their mutual connection with Barak, no public information connects Yatom to Epstein.
From a July 2014 “Night Warfare Special Operations Unit” proposal by Danny Yatom’s Global Strategic Group, in a section entitled, “General Capabilities of the Unit (Night and Day).”
“Isn’t This Perfect For You”
While Africa has garnered little attention in news coverage of Epstein’s sexual misconduct, the continent was central to his and Barak’s joint mission of obtaining and exploiting elite political access, cutting-edge artificial intelligence infrastructure, and energy and mineral resources. Drop Site has previously reported on Epstein’s role in brokering a security deal between Israel and Cotê d’Ivoire, and a logistics deal between Nigeria and the Dubai-based shipping conglomerate DP World.
The Handala files contain thousands of records concerning Barak’s and Epstein’s efforts to control oil, gas, and minerals across the African continent during the 2010s by leveraging Barak’s credentials as the widely respected head of the Israel Defense Forces. “With civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia, libya, and the desperation of those in power,” Epstein wrote in a 2014 email to Barak, “isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied, “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow.”
That cash flow came from the financial interests fueling the wars. As an Israeli-trained force fought M23 in the hills of North Kivu in the spring of 2013, emails show that Epstein’s Emirati associate Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem was opening a separate channel to Joseph Kabila, then Congolese president, over investments in mining, oil, gas, and transport infrastructure. By 2018, in the year before his death, Epstein was quietly involved in sanctions diplomacy around the U.S. Treasury Department’s crackdown on an Israeli mining kingpin profiting from Congo’s conflict minerals.
In the summer of 2014, with close guidance from Epstein, Barak was engaged with security officials in Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire, while simultaneously negotiating strategic investments in ports and petroleum assets across West Africa. On July 28, 2014, emails show that Yatom supplied Barak with sales materials to promote Global Strategic Group as a private-sector provider of military training and operational support.
Yatom’s company offered a special operations unit that had been provided to Congo’s army during the first war against M23 from 2012 to 2013. The program trained a “Tier One Strike Force” counter-terror squad, a 150-person elite unit trained for night raids, ambushes, counter terrorism, hostage rescue, sniper operations, thermal observation, and direct-action missions.
The Congo case study claimed the Israeli-trained unit had carried out repeated night operations under fire in North Kivu and that those raids helped shift the battlefield in favor of the Congolese army. Emails published by Wikileaks show that Nir and Omer Yatom, Danny’s sons, had also engaged Italy’s notorious Hacking Team to purchase cyberweapons “for state use” in the Congo during the same period, in the spring of 2013.
Since Epstein’s death, the conflict over Africa’s natural resources has entered a new chapter, as the United States seeks to actively counter China’s dominant role in the Congo’s mining sector. On April 27, 2026, Congo’s mining agency announced the creation of a new paramilitary army to secure mines and mineral supply chains.
The mining security program was described as a $100 million initiative in partnership with the United States and the United Arab Emirates, with a target of more than 20,000 personnel by the end of 2028. The U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa has denied that Washington was funding the mine security force. Separately, Congo also agreed to accept people deported from the United States.
Washington is now eyeing Congo’s rich deposits of coltan ore. Coltan is used to manufacture tantalum capacitors, capable of delivering power to electronics in hot environments, like e-cigarette vape pens and densely packed servers in data centers. The Rubaya coltan mines in North Kivu, near the city of Goma on Congo’s eastern border with Rwanda, are controlled by the M23 Movement, the Rwandan-backed coalition that has seized large parts of eastern Congo.
On April 30, 2026, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Kabila for his alleged support for the M23 rebels. But, more than a decade ago, Kabila was leading the Armed Forces of the DRC in the fight against the M23 Movement. The war in eastern Congo has become one of the world’s deadliest and most intractable conflicts—one which multinational mining companies and private military contractors tied to Israeli intelligence have been eager to exploit.
