the world’s most lawless and volatile countries, the idea had a cer- tain absurd elegance. In some ways, it echoed the development projects that organizations like the World Bank and United Na- tions fund all the time. Typical of Le Roux, the plan was a kind of hack. Just as he had exploited a hole in the American healthcare system to sell painkillers, he planned to take advantage of a dys- functional government to exploit the resources it couldn’t harvest.

Le Roux had even figured out the logistics and sent advance men to begin scouting locations for the operation. Now he wanted Klaussen to take the reins. Using a shell company called Southern Ace, he would set up a base camp several hours inland in Galkayo, a city of 500,000 that straddles two regions of central Somalia, Puntland and Galmudug. Once he’d established a secure facility there, he would expand to the coast, where Southern Ace would provide boats and equipment for local fishermen, build a plant to process and freeze the tuna, and pave an airstrip to ship it out to lucrative markets. “He had it all nicely planned out,” Klaussen said. “So why not? There’s nothing illegal about that. It’s a bit dangerous, but that’s okay.”

A few weeks later Klaussen found himself in Nairobi, laying the groundwork for the project. There wasn’t much in the way of blueprints for building an international company in Somalia, which lacked a functioning central government and was controlled instead by an assortment of competing clans. Al-Shabaab, the mil- itant Islamic group designated by Western countries as an interna- tional terrorist organization, was on the rise, having gained control of large swathes of territory in 2006 after a U.S.-backed invasion by Ethiopia. Galmudug state, where Klaussen was meant to set up, was considered so volatile that the U.N. itself rarely ventured there; international NGOs limited their presence to local Somali staff. The president of Galmudug himself, a former Somali ambas- sador to the United States named Mohamed Warsame Ali, some- times conducted state business from Nairobi, a thousand miles away.