In the early nineteen-eighties, Susan Katz Keating was living in California, working as a freelance journalist with a side gig waiting tables. On a newsstand, she came across Soldier of Fortune, a monthly magazine infamous for its gonzo war reporting and its gun-for-hire classified ads. “I wanted to write about mercenaries,” she recalled recently. So she placed an advertisement in the publication. “You paid by the word, and I was quite young and didn’t have any money. The ad said, ‘Are you a mercenary? Contact S. Katz.’ And then I gave my home address.”
Keating was flooded with letters. A handful of seemingly professional warrior types arrived at her door unannounced. “I also got some government agents showing up, because they thought that I was trying to raise a mercenary army,” Keating said.
In 1986, Keating began contributing to Soldier of Fortune, the rare woman to do so. Two years ago, she achieved a longtime dream by purchasing the magazine from its founder, the retired lieutenant colonel Robert K. Brown, for an undisclosed sum. She now operates as its publisher and editor-in-chief.
Earlier this summer, Keating, who lives in Tampa, was sitting with a coffee at a hotel restaurant in downtown Brooklyn, dressed in a casual black-skirt-and-vest combo. She was there to meet with a friend and adviser to discuss the likelihood of political violence during the Presidential election.
While she waited, Keating explained that her fascination with mercenaries began as a child. She grew up in California but moved with her mother to Ireland in the seventies, after Keating’s dad died in what was ruled a suicide. (She still has her doubts—she said she learned that his fatal wounds came from two different guns.) “We got there right when Bloody Sunday happened,” Keating said. “So I was exposed to a whole lot of real violence with political intent.” On a family trip, a teen-age Keating befriended Sir Eric de Burgh, an elderly British Army officer (and the grandfather of the singer Chris de Burgh). He had served in the Boer War and told her tales of soldiers for hire. “That sparked my interest,” she said.
Keating is in the process of revitalizing Soldier of Fortune, which experienced a significant circulation decline after the end of the Cold War and shifted to a fully online platform in 2016. (In the late eighties, the magazine was sued several times by families of people targeted or killed by hit men recruited through its pages. The gun-for-hire ads were discontinued in 1986.) The readership today is about ninety per cent male. “I love the bro culture,” Keating said. She added that the audience leans right of center. She described her own politics as “anti-communist,” but stressed that she tries to remain as neutral as possible in her journalism.
Keating writes about a third of the magazine’s articles herself. The rest are written by freelancers. “I had one in Africa, and he just disappeared,” she said. “It turns out he was bitten by a black mamba, and he got really sick.” Her splashiest article followed up on reports that a packet of cocaine was found in the White House in July, 2023. She wrote that it was brought by “someone within the Biden-family orbit.” (She didn’t disclose who it was, but she said it was not, as conservatives had speculated, the President’s son Hunter.) Her account wasn’t picked up by most major news outlets, and the White House hasn’t commented, though Keating said that “an intermediary” had communicated the Administration’s reaction. “They’re pissed,” she said.
After a while, her friend, Chad Longell, arrived. He had a modest beard and wore a black baseball hat. Longell, an amiable thirty-seven-year-old Army veteran and a former national director of military and veteran engagement for the Republican National Committee, described himself as an “intel guy” for a number of government agencies he wasn’t at liberty to name. His advisory role with Soldier of Fortune is an informal one. “We talk strategy on different things,” he explained.
He and Keating dived into a discussion of the election. “I hope I’m wrong, but I’m expecting unrest,” Keating said.
“It’s just a question of who,” Longell agreed. Neither thought that there would be another event on the scale of January 6th, which they both deemed to have been blown out of proportion anyway. “A lot of people call it an insurrection,” Keating said. “But it wasn’t.” “It was stupid people,” Longell added. “My brother”—a uniformed Secret Service officer—“was one of the ones who responded to get Pence out of the Capitol. I think that building is a sacred, sacred place. To see it trashed like that? Good thing I wasn’t down there. I would have been a lot more aggressive.”
Not long after their meeting, Donald Trump was wounded on the ear in an assassination attempt. Keating provided an update on her violence forecast: she had become surprisingly sanguine.
“There have not been any follow-on attacks or counterattacks, which I think would have happened by now if this had been an Archduke Ferdinand moment,” she said. “I see the hit on Trump as another iteration of the school-shooter, mall-shooter phenomenon, and not as a political flash point. We are not headed for a civil war.” She added, “Of course, I could be wrong.” ♦
