Eeben Barlow

Lt-Col. Eeben Barlow is a veteran of the South African Defence Force and was the second-in-command of its elite special forces 32 Battalion Reconnaissance Wing. He later served in Military Intelligence as an agent handler and later as an operative and region commander in the ultra-secret Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), a covert division of Special Forces. He founded the private military contractor (PMC) Executive Outcomes (EO) in 1989, and was involved in providing counter-insurgency as well as peacekeeping forces in Africa and Asia. Barlow resigned from Executive Outcomes in July 1997 and the company closed its doors on 31 December 1998. Barlow is the former chairman of STTEP, but also lectures on military matters at defence colleges and universities. Some consider Eeben Barlow the grandfather of modern private military companies as the founder of Executive Outcomes. Shannon Sedgwick Davis stated in her book about an alliance to stop the atrocities of the Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army, "Eeben Barlow and the trainers, your sweat and sacrifice translated to lives saved, thank you."