An Open Letter to Erik Prince and the Off Leash Group Chat: You're the Most Boring Fucking Crew of Black Bag Operators, Mercenaries, and Undercover Operatives I've Ever Encountered

I was vaguely keeping tabs on Off Leash until December, but I lost interest. Even the private musings of members of a far-right global network becomes tedious when the lunacy quota gets too high.

Their Man in Washington: Donald Trump, as seen in the eyes of Off Leash members.

Dear Erik et al,

How’s it going? I know your 2025 is off to a good start with your buddies Donald Trump and Elon Musk running the country, and Off Leash members Pete Hegseth and Seb Gorka being named to top jobs in the new administration. I know the crew hasn’t forgotten about me because Jean-Pierre Alumba Lukamba follows me on Twitter (Hi @AlumbaLukamba) and I periodically hear through the grapevine that you all periodically have fun at my expense during the group chat conversation by writing to me directly as if I’m a member myself since, the punchline goes, I’m probably reading along anyway (Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Saghar Erica Kasraie).

Just so you know, I did keep reading along, in a manner of speaking, for months after first exposing the group chat last May in the New Republic. I still could, but I largely lost interest and forgot about Off Leash.

The reason for my indifference had nothing to do with the group’s politics, as I have a lot of friends and sources on the far-right. Nor was it due to some sort of moral squeamishness — even though the flat out fascist lunacy of Nazi scion Sven von Storch, your business partner Michael Yudelson, and the Israeli psychos who wanted to “nuke Gaza,” to name the most obvious Off Leash members who should be immediately locked up in homes for the criminally insane — does tend to make a person despair of all hope for humanity.

Sven von Storch, whose aristocratic parents fled Germany after World War II and settled in Chile. Their son grew up to become a fan boy of former dictator Augusto Pinochet and returned to the land of his ancestors, where he married the granddaughter of the Third Reich’s last de facto head of state, who was convicted at Nuremberg.

As a journalist, I’ll talk to anyone who’ll talk to me and I almost always find that listening to opposing perspectives enriches and sometimes alters my own opinions. In fact, when it comes to morally dubious characters, I’ve talked to plenty of people arguably worse than any members of Off Leash, including Ernst Werner Glatt, a far right-wing German and black market arms dealer for the CIA, and Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, the former head of Sudanese intelligence who was Osama bin Laden‘s minder when he lived in Khartoum back in the day.

I met both of those people and enjoyed talking to them so I guess I’m probably a bad human being too, but those two guys were genuinely fascinating and intelligent, and I’d certainly have a long conversation with Steve Bannon, to pull one of many possible names out of a hat, for the same reason. I don’t like his politics, but he’s no dummy, to understate matters.

That’s not the case with members of Off Leash, at least the crew of loony tunes that dominates most of the group chat’s conversation, with a few exceptions. For example, Nathan Jacobson is a longtime friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I couldn’t disagree more with his views on the Middle East, but he’s a fascinating character and great storyteller who I’d buy drinks any day of the week.

Collectively, though, Off Leash’s members have done the seemingly impossible by making a private discussion between a group of black bag operators, influence peddlers, mercenaries, and intelligence operatives more boring than the average dinner table conversation at a retirement home for retired life insurance salesmen. I mean, is there a single country in the world not completely in the US/Western orbit you guys (overwhelmingly) don’t want to invade, bomb to smithereens, or overthrow? Because that’s pretty much all you talk about, and it’s hard not to nod off during your endless rantings about which foreign government needs to be put in its place next.

Anyway, Erik, I just wanted to let you know I haven’t completely forgotten about you, and I’ll be writing about you again soon as I’ve been researching your activities in Venezuela for quite awhile. Very curious. But Off Leash? Buy me a one-way ticket to the retirement home for insurance salesmen, that’s a far hotter story.

Cheers and best to you and the gang,

Ken Silverstein