By Jessica Donati
DAKAR (Reuters) -An Israeli-American businessman, a former State Department official and a decorated Green Beret pitched up in the Democratic Republic of Congo in March with a message for President Felix Tshisekedi from the Trump administration.
Two days later, they fled the country in fear of arrest.
The three envoys had come with an offer from Washington: release three American prisoners on death row and, in return, President Donald Trump will accept your minerals-for-security proposal.
The trip started well with a police motorcycle escort from the airport, but a frosty first meeting with Tshisekedi’s security adviser, some ill-advised late-night target practice by some of the envoys and a Congolese general with an axe to grind put paid to the mission.
Reuters pieced together the course of events by speaking to the three Americans on the trip, a State Department official involved in the initiative, and two people the trio met during their brief stay in Congo’s capital Kinshasa.
The story of the ill-fated venture, which has not previously been reported, provides a glimpse of how the Trump administration is prepared to work through unconventional channels in pursuit of deals to bring Americans home, a top priority for the president.
“We want to work with folks who have the right connections, but more importantly, have the positive relationships that can help influence a decision-maker’s thinking … so it’s not uncommon for us to do that,” Dustin Stewart, Trump’s deputy special envoy for hostage affairs, who was involved in discussions on the initiative, told Reuters.
“We thought they had enough sway to talk to the right people. Obviously, that proved incorrect,” he said.
President Tshisekedi’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Congo has become a focus of U.S. diplomatic efforts to end the decades-long conflict in the east and help American companies access critical minerals, making the country ripe territory for endeavours such as this mission.
“Trump gave every indication right from the beginning that he was going to be purely transactional,” said Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “He’s thrown out the old playbook. He’s not going through normal diplomatic channels.”
AMERICANS ON DEATH ROW
It all started in January this year when Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana met the Congolese president on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos to warn him about a coup plot purportedly involving Israelis.
Kahana handed over the names of the alleged plotters to Tshisekedi in an envelope, according to the businessman and two other people involved. Reuters could not determine whether the alleged plot was real.
Kahana told Reuters he was aware that Washington had a number of live interests in Congo, and after returning from Davos he decided to try to arrange another meeting with Tshisekedi.
Three Americans had been sentenced to death by a Congolese military court in September 2024 for participating in a separate, failed coup in May last year. Efforts to free them by the Biden government and the Trump administration had gained little traction.
At the same time, negotiations were intensifying over a deal in which the United States would secure greater access to Congo’s minerals in return for help defending the country from Rwanda-backed insurgents rampaging across its eastern provinces.
To get the ball rolling, Kahana met with State Department officials in Washington in March. The officials thought it worth empowering a team led by Kahana to discuss U.S. diplomatic goals and the release of the three Americans with Tshisekedi, the businessman and the State Department’s Stewart said.
“I don’t think anybody had high hopes that they were going to be able to sort of go to Kinshasa and come back with those three,” he said. “But, again, I think reinforcing the message that it was important to find a positive resolution, it helped us.”
UNLIKELY CAST
Kahana had a track record of extracting people from dangerous places. His exploits included rescuing about 200 Jewish orphans from Ukraine in 2022 and the last Jew from Afghanistan when the Taliban took control in 2021.
For the Congo mission, he signed up two other Americans. One was former U.S. Green Beret Justin Sapp. He was among the first soldiers to infiltrate Afghanistan in 2001 and had explored a project with Kahana to deliver aid to Gaza the previous year.
For Kahana, who said he does business alongside his philanthropic ventures, the motivation was to win praise for bringing home the Americans, while eyeing business opportunities in Congo. He brought in Sapp as an expert on security.
“He generally sees himself as the guy saving the day,” said Sapp. “Now, is he doing it for free? In the end, no.”
The other was Stuart Seldowitz, a business associate of Kahana’s and former U.S. diplomat who was charged with a hate crime for verbally abusing a Halal hot dog vendor in New York in 2023.
Seldowitz said the charges were dismissed after he completed a 26-week anti-bias course.
Seldowitz was an old acquaintance of the U.S. ambassador to Congo, Lucy Tamlyn, which Kahana said could come in handy.
On their first night in Kinshasa, the trio had expected a discussion over dinner with Tshisekedi’s security adviser, Desire-Cashmir Kolongele Eberande. But they said he was not in a welcoming mood when he finally saw them at 1 a.m.
“We were supposed to have a meeting with the president the next day,” Sapp said. “In retrospect, I’m not sure we had a firm meeting with him. I think it was tentative, and they were going to sniff us out. And then we didn’t pass the sniff test.”
Sapp said Eberande was suspicious about whether the trio were actually authorised to convey a message from Trump.
Eberande did not respond to requests for comment about the American mission.
Kahana reached out to Washington for help. The next day, Stewart sent an email to Eberande confirming the State Department knew of the visitors, and Eberande begrudgingly accepted their credentials, Kahana said.
“Per our previous exchange, this is to confirm that I am aware of the travel of Mr. Seldowitz and Mr. Kahana as it pertains to the status of the three Americans in custody,” Stewart wrote in the email, seen by Reuters.
That evening, while the trio waited to see if President Tshisekedi would meet them, they were invited for dinner by an Israeli security contractor on a compound within an army base in Kinshasa.
Another guest was an Israeli-French arms dealer who had been doing business in Congo for decades and helped set up Kahana’s first meeting with Tshisekedi in Davos, according to the arms dealer, Kahana and Kinuani Kamitatu Massamba, a Congolese politician close to Tshisekedi.
After dinner, the host invited the guests for a shooting session at the compound’s range. Kahana and Sapp agreed to take part.
The next morning, Kahana received a call from Massamba, who said Congo’s intelligence services were upset about the late-night gunfire.
Massamba told Reuters the shooting had raised alarm about a possible attack on the presidential palace.
It was at that point that things became alarming for the Americans.
‘GOOD TO BE AMERICAN’
General Franck Ntumba, head of the presidential guard, showed up at their hotel, demanding they surrender their passports and visit his headquarters.
“He didn’t look like he wanted to be screwed around with,” Seldowitz said.
Ntumba did not respond to requests for comment.
Ntumba had been one of the people Kahana named as an alleged coup plotter to President Tshisekedi in Davos. Kahana said that before the trip he was slightly concerned about Ntumba, but was hopeful the general didn’t know he was behind the list.
Seldowitz called his old acquaintance the U.S. ambassador.
A large contingent of embassy staff soon showed up at the hotel to protect the Americans, the Israeli-French arms dealer said.
“I thought, wow, it’s good to be American in this situation. It was like a movie, believe me,” he said.
Ntumba eventually left, but warned the trio that things would not end there. An American security officer at the embassy gave them three options: stay in their hotel rooms and hope no one kicks down the doors, move to another hotel, or leave Congo immediately.
“And I said, well, I like the third option the best,” said Kahana.
The embassy sent a car with diplomatic plates to take them to the airport. The trio arrived as an Air France flight for Paris was boarding.
But at passport control, they were taken into a room and asked for their phones. Seldowitz called the embassy again. Air France staff came and the three Americans were released.
The U.S. embassy referred Reuters questions about the trio’s mission to the State Department. Hostage envoy Stewart confirmed its staff had stepped in to rescue the three men.
While the men’s mission did not go as planned, progress has since been made on their initial goals. Massamba, Stewart and Kahana all said it helped signal that Trump was serious about striking a deal involving the American prisoners.
In April, Tshisekedi commuted the sentences of the three Americans convicted of coup-plotting to life in prison. Soon afterwards, Trump’s senior Africa adviser, Massad Boulos, visited Congo and the three were transferred to the United States, where they were charged with conspiring to carry out a coup on Congo.
The men – Marcel Malanga, Tyler Thompson and Benjamin Zalman-Polun – are currently in custody after pleading not guilty. Their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment about the mission to free them.
“As you’ve seen, the three were pardoned and released,” the State Department’s Stewart said. “That was the outcome that we were looking for.”
And in June, Congo and Rwanda signed a U.S.-brokered peace deal in Washington to end fighting in the mineral-rich east.
“We’re getting, for the United States, a lot of the mineral rights from the Congo as part of it,” said Trump.
(Additional reporting by Sonia Rolley in Paris and Ange Adihe Kasongo in Kinshasa; Editing by Estelle Shirbon and David Clarke)
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