AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.After years in elite police units, he drew scrutiny from human rights groups for selling arms and providing other services to unsavory governments.
He was 80.Paul Barril in 1991. After he left the gendarmerie, or French national police, in the 1980s, he became a security adviser and mercenary provider.Credit...Jean-Michel Turpin/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesNov.
12, 2026, 6:01 p.m. ETPaul Barril’s offer to African dictators was straightforward: Your opponents will be subjected to surveillance and manipulation.
Newspapers will be “infiltrated.” Plots against the state will be “neutralized.”Plenty of heads of state took up the services he offered, including Omar Bongo in Gabon and Denis Sassou-Nguesso in Congo. Other clients went to Paris to do their shopping at his Security Action Store, which offered the latest in bulletproof vests or night-vision goggles, as Mr.
Barril recounted in one of his six autobiographies, “The Elysee’s Secret Wars” (1996).Mr. Barril was often described in the news media as a former French “supergendarme” for his longtime work in elite units.
After he left the gendarmerie, or national police, in 1984, he became a security adviser and mercenary provider across the African continent and was implicated by human rights groups in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.His death, on Oct. 20 at 80 at his home in Antibes, France, was announced by the French interior ministry.
He had Parkinson’s disease.By the time he founded his mercenary-security company, Secrets, a French acronym for Security Equipment Planning and Realization Company, in 1984, Mr. Barril was a well-chronicled public figure.In the gendarmerie, which in France is under the military, he joined a new military police intervention unit, the GIGN, in 1974.
The French news media chronicled Mr. Barril’s reputation as an ultrafit top cop, a military-grade swimmer and diver, a black belt in karate, a parachutist, a hostage liberator and a policeman working inside and outside the law.
With the GIGN, he participated in the 1979 operation against Islamist militants who had seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking dozens hostage.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?
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