History
After having served with the French Navy in Indochina and in French Algeria, Denard served as a colonial policeman in Morocco from 1952 to 1957. In 1954, he was convicted of an assassination plot against Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, a left-wing member of the Radical-Socialist Party who was negotiating the end of the Indochina War and withdrawal of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, and served 14 months in jail. An adamant anti-Communist, Denard then took part in many anti-colonialist struggles, simultaneously on his own behalf and on the behalf of the French state. Once he was freed from jail, he worked for the French secret services during the war in Algeria.
After his discharge from the French navy, Bob Denard was briefly a policeman in Morocco and a demonstrator for washing machines in Paris. He began his mercenary career, which was to span three decades, in Katanga, probably in December 1961 when he and other foreign mercenaries were brought in by the leader of the mercenaries in Katanga, Roger Faulques. He became famous after rescuing white civilians encircled by rebels in Stanleyville. Denard fought there until the secessionist movement led by Moise Tshombe collapsed in January 1963. Then, Denard and his men fled to Portuguese-controlled Angola.
Denard is known to have participated in conflicts in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Yemen, Iran, Nigeria, Benin, Gabon, Angola, Zaire and the Comoros, the last-named nation having been subject to more than twenty coups d'état in the past decades. For most of his career Denard had the quiet backing of France and the French secret service which wished to maintain French influence over its ex-colonies.
In mid-1963 he made his way to North Yemen, which was then in the middle of a civil war between a Nasserist government and royalist tribesmen. The royalists were supported by the Western Europeans and Saudi Arabia. The French and British sponsored a number of mercenaries to train the royalist volunteers in military techniques, and Bob Denard was among those who joined the Imam al-Badr, leader of the royalists.
After about eighteen months Denard returned to the Congo to take employment under Moise Tshombe who was now the prime minister of the central government in Leopoldville from July 1964 till October 1965 when was dismissed by President Joseph Kasa Vubu. Denard served for two years in the Congo battling Simba rebels supporters of the late Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, who had been murdered in Katanga in 1961 after having been overthrown by rival politicians and severely tortured while in transit. The Simba rebels were backed by the Chinese and Cubans, including Che Guevara while Lumumba's murderers were tacitly backed by the CIA and Belgium. Denard was in charge of his own unit of French mercenaries called les affreux (lit. : the awfuls). Denard helped put down an attempted coup on behalf of Tshombe by Katangan separatists in July 1966.
A year later Denard sided with Katangan separatists and Belgian mercenaries led by Jean Schramme in a revolt in eastern Congo. The rebels soon found themselves bottled up in Bukavu. Denard was wounded in the initial rising and flew out with a group of more seriously wounded men to Rhodesia. In January 1968 he invaded Katanga with a force of a hundred men on bicycles in an attempt to create a diversion for a breakout from Bukavu. The invasion was a farce.
Denard missed out on mercenary activity in Biafra during the Nigerian civil war during the late 1960s. From 1968 to 1978 he was employed supporting the government in Gabon and was available to carry out military actions on behalf of the French government in Africa. He may have been involved in a raid against Guinea in 1970. He was involved in a failed coup attempt in Benin (Opération Crevette, or Operation Shrimp), against Mathieu Kérékou, the leader of the People's Revolutionary Party of Benin, in 1977. Although Jacques Foccart denied personal knowledge of the attempted coup after its failure, he did recognize that it had been backed-up by Gnassingbé Eyadéma (Togo), Houphouet-Boigny (Ivory Coast), Omar Bongo (Gabon) and Hassan II (Morocco), all allies of France.
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