Meet the Aussie ex-soldier who businesses call when disaster strikes abroad
Rodger Cook turned 22 surrounded by mass graves in Rwanda. Now the Brisbane-born ex soldier runs a hi-tech global operation rescuing executives and leisure travellers from disaster.
April 2025 marked 31 years since the Rwandan genocide in Africa – a grim milestone that echoes through time.
In just 100 days in 1994, an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered by ethnic Hutu extremists.
For Australian Rodger Cook, who marked his 22nd birthday among the mass graves and shattered sanctuaries of Kigali, it was the crucible that forged a lifetime of frontline crisis leadership.
Today, Cook is the general manager of global risk services at World Travel Protection, the travel risk arm of Zurich Insurance Group.
From a sleek command centre in Brisbane humming with live feeds, maps and the quiet tension of unfolding emergencies, he and his team protect more than 250,000 travellers a month across the world.
His work spans assisting industries and demographics from executives to university students, preventing crises before they happen and responding when they do.
One day he could be advising a mining executive in a conflict zone. The next, it could be helping a high school plan a safe trip to Paris.
The roots of Cook’s calm-under-fire demeanour stretch back to 1994, when he arrived in Rwanda as a young infantryman in the Australian Army, providing security for a United Nations medical support force.
It was a world away from the classic Aussie upbringing he left behind in Brisbane suburbia.
“Rwanda was probably the hardest from the perspective of what you saw there. The mass graves and those things were probably the most confronting given all the different jobs that I’ve done now,” he says, adding that he has been responsible many times for searching through the uniforms of soldiers killed in combat.
“There was a church which I think has been turned into a memorial now, which had hundreds of bodies strewn through it,” he recalls.
“You couldn’t see the pews for the bodies that were on the ground or dismembered children from the Sunday school at the back.
“Obviously they sought refuge there and had been attacked. So that was confronting.”
The horror of what he saw did not break him. It built resilience.
“Rwanda sort of helped me build mental strength, and the things that I was exposed to sort of strengthened that aspect of how I viewed life and how I compartmentalised the things that I was seeing,” he says.
His military career spanned deployments in East Timor and Iraq, culminating in a role as intelligence sergeant during which he led small teams through chaotic, politically charged terrain.
It was a quieter moment in Iraq that left a lasting mark.
“The Australian forces had accidentally shot a taxi driver in Iraq. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and his vehicle was critically damaged. He ended up in hospital and contracted all sorts of diseases,” Cook says.
“I remember going to see him with our commanding officer. We gave him compensation, I think it was the equivalent of about $US11,000. I remember him looking at the envelope and you could see that he wasn’t happy.
“The money wouldn’t pay to replace the vehicle that was destroyed. But then he goes, ‘I’m not happy but you got rid of him.’ He turned around and walked away.”
The man was talking about the late Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.
That moment – not a firefight but a fractured peace – has stuck with Cook ever since then.
“Not in any sort of mental fatigue type way,” he insists.
“But just the fact that he’s gone through such a tumultuous life, being a Kurdish man living under Saddam’s rule and then things have finally opened up for him.
“He’s got a car and he’s driving it as a taxi to help his family. Then his saviours, the people who got rid of Saddam, are the ones that put him in hospital.”
Born into military life
Cook was born into a military household in the suburb of Stafford Heights, Northern Brisbane, the eldest of four children. His parents were young; when he was born his father was 21 and his mother 18.
His father, who became a butcher after his schooling, entered the regular army after being enlisted for national service.
Cook’s mother had a stint in the army reserve. At the age of 25 she had four children under the age of 7. His grandfather was also in the military.
But Cook wasn’t one of those kids who dreamt of wielding weapons and earning medals.
“I had no desire as a child to join the military at all. It was the thing that sort of took my father away. So I wasn’t enamoured by the military,” he says.
He left school at 15 and did hard-graft jobs like labouring at a meat works, before becoming interested in the military during the first Iraq war in 1990.
He enlisted, but the war had been over for five months when on July 23, 1991 he was sent to the Blamey Barracks at Kapooka near Wagga Wagga, NSW, where all Australian Army recruits undertake their initial training.
By 22, he was part of a nine-man team serving in some of the world’s most volatile environments. He later learned to manage and coach junior officers while making high-stakes decisions on the ground.
“Defence gives you the confidence to do things you probably aren’t qualified for, but once you do it, you realise it isn’t a dark art,” Cook says.
His thirst for intelligence separated him from the pack.
“It was always fascinating to me to know a little bit more than what the average soldier did. I was always interested in what was going on in the bigger picture than what I was told, and how we fitted into the global narrative.”
After 15 years in the Australian Defence Force, Cook transitioned to corporate security, working across the globe in remote mining operations – from Papua New Guinea and Zambia, to Indonesia and Madagascar – for companies like Barrick Gold and Morobe Mining.
There his ability to adapt under pressure proved invaluable, especially where he was thrown in the deep end overseeing emergency responses, medical evacuations and security operations at remote sites in PNG where lawlessness reigned.
But the nomadic grind took its toll.
“It is a tough life, moving around in the military,” he says.
His first marriage, which lasted 17 years, ended during those years. He has two daughters from that marriage, aged 23 and 17, who lived with him on mine sites after his military career was over.
Now he lives in Brisbane with his fiancee of more than a decade and their four-year-old daughter, and they have another child on the way.
“The military definitely helps how you go about your business elsewhere. But I cut clean from the military when I left,” Cook says.
“I didn’t go to any reunions, I didn’t keep in touch with a lot of the guys and I didn’t have Facebook, or anything like that. I didn’t go into the reserves. I really did cut clean.”
Military mindset for civilian protection
When he joined World Travel Protection (WTP) five years ago, Cook’s biggest challenge was bringing a military-grade mindset to a commercial world often blind to its own vulnerabilities.
“My role joining was to build out the security piece to get the tracking and those things that corporates expect when they travel overseas,” he explains.
He now leads a team of security professionals, paramedics, doctors, and nurses who assist travellers in distress; not only individuals from corporations but also leisure travellers.
While the majority of WTP’s leisure market customers access its services as part of their travel insurance, there are also clients who choose to book directly.
“A recent example would be Israel,” Cook says.
“People who travel to Israel, when the conflict increases their insurance is null and void. But we still provide what we call non-financial assistance and aid them in getting out of country if that’s their wish.”
With operations centres in Brisbane, London and Toronto, WTP operates a “follow-the-sun” model that ensures seamless handovers between continents.
“We have terrific tracking technology where travellers can have an app and we can see where they are in real time,” Cook says.
“It is the first time that any company has given a leisure traveller the same sort of level of intelligence that a corporate traveller would expect.”
For a corporate client such as a mining company with up to 500 staff going all over the world each year, WTP charges an annual fee of up to $80,000 for giving travelling staff access to its network and technology – including intelligence advice 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
But a key focus of Cook’s team is understanding the clients.
“We focus on the traveller themselves. What sort of inherent risks do they carry? What is their profile? Then we mitigate those risks as much as we can,” he says.
“Then we focus on the destination they are going to. Obviously, some destinations have an inherent risk, and that risk can change over time. Then the last thing we really focus on is ‘what activity are they doing?’ If they are an executive who is going to a shareholder meeting that might have some sort of risk associated with it, a different risk profile may be prepared.
“We definitely got a lot of phone calls from insurance or health executives after the shooting in New York last December. So understanding the activity that you are doing is really important.”
One of his most dramatic rescues came not on a battlefield, but over a phone line on Christmas morning last year.
At 3am, Cook spoke with two missionaries – one American, one Russian – trapped in a school in Mozambique after their farm was torched by rioters.
Huddled with a group of nuns, they had no backup and only a vague plan to escape on a motorbike using TikTok videos as a map.
“It wasn’t the ideal way to engage our services,” Cook says dryly. “They had no tracking. But we were able to do it.”
While the missionaries were preparing to flee, the school was attacked.
“They actually had to escape to another area, but we were able to pick them up and get them out of there,” he says.
His decades of relationship-building paid off.
“I met these guys, the security providers, in Poland two or three years before. We know a lot of the same people. I’ve got a really good network … they were willing to go above and beyond.”
Now nearing the age of 53, Cook is deeply embedded in the flow of crises, solutions, and constant motion.
But at the end of the day, he says the appreciation and management of risk when travelling abroad in today’s volatile world is up to the individual.
“If you have a senior executive who is a regular traveller, then they are quite happy to go off on their own and do their own thing, regardless of the risk. In some organisations, they control it a lot better. Some senior leaders understand it and are willing to adapt to the environment that they need to,” he says.
“I’ve worked for organisations who lost people in the Marriott hotel bombings in Indonesia, who still have no concept of the risk that their executives face.
“So some organisations don’t learn. Some keep those learnings and they make it part of their culture. So it really does come down to the individuals and their leadership style.”
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