by Simon Mann
My mind clicks.
When these goons had waved their Stars at me before, I had seen their hammers were back. They hadn’t re-cocked a weapon since, so their bravado had been only that: they had no rounds in the chamber. They still don’t.
‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Are you brave?’ ‘How tough are you?’ ‘Do you think you are tougher than a black man?’ ‘Do you think you are better because you are white?’ ‘Who knows where you are?’ ‘Who cares where you are?’ ‘How long will it be before anyone misses you?’ ‘What can they do to help you – here in Zimbabwe?’ ‘Are you ready to die?’ ‘Would you like us to kill you – or shall we wound you … leave you for the crocodiles to finish you…?’
Even when they do shoot me I still won’t believe it.
‘Please kill me first. Please don’t leave me to the crocodiles…’ I say. But not to them. I say it to myself.
Fucking hell.
Am I scared? Yes.
*The Apartheid government couldn’t tolerate vices like gambling, topless dancing and inter-racial sex. Not in the homeland of the Volk. Sun City, in South Africa’s North West Province, was founded in 1979 by tycoon Sol Kerzner in the heart of the bush, Bophuthatswana – one of a series of nominally independent homelands set up by the Apartheid government. As a result, Sun City could sidestep South Africa’s puritanical laws. Today it is again part of South Africa.
*Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was formerly Leopoldville, after Belgian King Leopold II. In the late 19th century, Leopold ran the region as a personal fiefdom. His agents raped it for slaves, ivory and gold, killing anyone in their way. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called it ‘a crime against humanity’, journalist Richard Dowden a ‘place of physical and spiritual horror’. It is truly Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
*SA NI is the South African equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.
*LO, a Liaison Officer, like an SBLO – a Special Branch Liaison Officer – between the SAS and the Northern Ireland Police Special Branch.
*The precise figure is 92.3 deaths per 1,000 live births, and 155.4 per 1,000 live births in under-fives, according to the UN Population Prospects report, 2005–10.
*A military term for Greenwich Mean Time.
CHAPTER TWO
OK. So just how does this whole fucking shambles kick off anyway? Sometime in late 2002, I’m introduced to Wayne Adams, a spivvy property something-or-other. A wannabe adventurer. He’s short, heavy, fat. Tod slipper shoes, his ankles buckle. Greasy, pitch-black hair, too long. Greasy skin. Rich car. Rich clothes. Centre of the Universe.
Early 2003, he asks me (Africa Hand) to visit Gabon: he had become big mates with the President of that country – the late and unlamented Bongo.* The President, it turns out, had taken a shine to Wayne when they had met on holiday.
My seven-day trip to Libreville is as much a waste of time as I had feared. A pain in the arse. The city is a dump, a slum, despite years of oil boom. The palace of Monsieur Le President Bongo, on the other hand, is a thing of beauty.
When I meet Bongo, I feel like laughing and not because of his name or because he is such a short arse (even in high Cuban heels). What is revoltingly hilarious is that nothing matters to Bongo except the flat dollar-a-barrel tariff deals that he has with Big Oil.
The Barrel Boyz.
Deals like this are what an oil company calls a Sweetheart Deal – but only behind their slammed closed doors. They aren’t so ‘sweetheart’ to the Joe Bloggses of Gabon. Bongo’s dollar-a-barrel Sweetheart Deal costs his country ten dollars a barrel, if a cent. The stupid fucker Bongo may not even know that. He wouldn’t care anyway.
Bongonomics.
By the end, the outcome of this business trip farce looks to be the waste of time that I had feared from the start.
Then, when I get back to London, I bump into an old girlfriend (at the time, I thought it a coincidence) who wants me to meet another, bigger big shot. The point of this meeting is to talk through the Gabon trip. To me that sounds like worse time flushed after bad, but I agree to meet the friend anyway. Big shots can be useful, and talking Bongonomics can be fun.
So, in February 2003, I find myself at a house in London. That the Gabon trip had been a set up doesn’t cross my mind. I am too busy being flattered by this guy’s great INT all about my career – especially of my feats in Angola and Sierra Leone. Then there is his thirst for my opinion on other African hotspot hell-holes.
When I meet the Boss, he somehow knows that I have twice been in Southern Sudan, as a guest of the rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), only months before. Somehow he knows that the first SPLA trip had gone walkabout – over the DRC border, into the northeastern region of Kilo Moto. The second had gone walkabout in the Ethiopian Frontier Mountains.
It is after this chatty Grand Tour of the horrors of Africa that he says it: ‘The one place where I would like to be King for a Day is Equatorial Guinea. Have you seen their crude oil figures? Their production? Their proven reserves? Billions!’
After more chat, the meeting is brought to an end. Something might be possible in the Sudan (agreed). Would I think about it and set out on paper what could work?
Back home I do think about it. I had liked the Boss. He is witty and smart. Very well dressed, but casual. Doesn’t suffer fools, but says so. Knows the score.
On my computer, I give the Sudan (poor bastards) my best shot (again). I wittily codename my paper ‘GORDON TWO’ – when actually it must be ‘GORDON FOUR’ or ‘GORDON FIVE’. You see, I had written up Sudan plans before, for other philanthropists.
The Sudan idea is to find some super – but frozen – asset – oil or gold – of which the Sudan has plenty. Once chosen, and agreed, then this asset could be brought out of the cold and into production, by the use of a private-venture military force – but acting under a government licence, and within a government partnership.
But which government? Khartoum tyrants? Or the Kenya-based SPLA rebels? Which one of those would be a question of where the asset is. North: Khartoum. Or South: Nairobi. Or both. Then it’s just a question of picking the nastiest bunch of local banditti. Hire them for security. Train them a little. Arm them better.
By chance I have already spent time looking into just the job: a gold mine in the Ingessana Hills, north-west of a place called Bau, close to the Ethiopia border. The mine had been developed, then abandoned, by a Chinese outfit. Profits had been high, but it hadn’t worked because of a pack of Shifta wannabe warlords.
Two sides of A4 set it out well enough. But somehow I’m not surprised when, at the next meeting with the Boss, advertised as a chat about ‘GORDON TWO’, he only nods – grandly – at my paper. Then he lays it down on the sofa beside him. What he really wants to talk about is President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. Tyrant. What about a coup to overthrow him? An ARC in the coin of that year of the Iraq invasion, 2003. What about an assassination of President Obiang? Would I lead such an Op? I had worked wonders in the Angolan war, and Sierra Leone’s, and I had done so without public fame or notoriety. I had impressed him. Am I in?
If Obiang is the terrible tyrant that everyone says he is, then what could be better than mounting a coup against him? It would be a good Op to carry out even if there were zero money to be made out of it. Why should the people of EG have to live under the cosh as they do? Why should anyone?
And then there are the supertanker loads of petrodollars to be made, some by me, even if it is made clear that there will be no cherry-picking of oil assets. There are other reasons too. There is the big picture opportunity. Our days in Angola and Sierra Leone had been great – but I and others had felt that we had not gone far enough. Every step we took we saw how we could vastly help poor and suffering Africans. The Africans agreed. Some mighty powerful other agencies, however, disagreed.
These agencies care mostly about oil. They want West Africa to be fragmented, chaotic, at war. They do not want a West Africa OPEC. Wha
t these Barrel Boyz want is fear and loathing… The Balkanisation of West Africa, as one CIA staff paper called it, while PowerPointing ‘the benefits’, bullet point by bullet point.
However, goes my thought: if I and the gang could be the power behind a democratically elected and vastly wealthy Equatorial Guinean throne, then we could be a real power for good in one of the worst parts of Africa.
There are other reasons. I am flattered to be asked. I want to make the money. I want to make a difference, make some lives better. I feel challenged to take on such a tough job. I want the danger and the hardship. I love the craic.
You see, I had made two fortunes winning the Angolan civil war, then spent one of them winning another: the Sierra Leone civil war. But Equatorial Guinea would be something else. I would be getting into it because I wanted to be in it, not because that was where the trade winds had blown me.
Anyway, as I say, it is 2003, and ARC is in vogue. I had played a part in the ‘sexing up’, the plotting, that had gone on, so as to bring about the Iraq invasion and the downfall of the arch tyrant Saddam Hussein. I had wholeheartedly put my shoulder to that wheel. So, in that case, why not private-venture ARCs?
I mean, how many people does any tyrant have to kill or torture before something can be done about the bastard? Walking past someone being beaten to death in the street, or mugged in a shopping mall, is not right. We all agree, even the Guardian. Walking past isn’t something any of us would like to do. It isn’t what our upbringing tells us to do. But, other than in scale, what’s the difference between a bunch of yobbos mugging an old lady and a tyrant mugging a people? Both like their victims weak, that’s for sure.
EG will be a tough mountain to climb. High, but it needs climbing. It will be hard. Dangerous. I want to trek back into the big mountains like a soak wants a drink. I want the job. I long to pull it off.
‘I’m in – but not for an assassination.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it won’t work. Kill Obiang and what happens next? You could get the son – Teodorino – and be no further forward. You could get the army, God help us … a home-grown coup. Then where are you?’
I say it, and I mean it. What I don’t say about the proposal is that an assassination is plain wrong. I feel that way, but I know the Boss won’t be keen on that kind of talk.
To me, the rightness of being ‘in’ on an EG coup is clear enough. If Obiang had been a benign dictator, then I would not become part of a plot to overthrow him. Not for any money. But even though Obiang is a full-on certificated and practising tyrant, his assassination is a non-starter.
So I’m in.
We set to work, and that means brainstorming the options.
The Boss is interested to hear how things had worked in Angola and Sierra Leone. I stress over and over how speed had been the key.
‘Speed and surprise are needed in the attack. But I’m talking about something else… I mean that we must be speedy, between the day when you give me the “Go!” – the day when you say that I have the green light – between then and the day when we actually do go. That was how we got away with what we did in Angola … and then again, in Sierra Leone. We were speedy. We moved faster than the leaks. Faster than all the government arseholes.
‘You see: we’re gonna have leaks – you can’t stop leaks … the only way round the leaks is to be fast. The one thing you must not do is give me GO … STOP … GO … STOP… That way we’ll be fucked.’
I say it. Then I say it again. I think he understands it. I really hope that he understands it. If this is to work, then that sort of speed and surprise will be the single most crucial factor.
I had become the ‘Go To Guy’ for military coups. The most notorious and best-paid mercenary of my generation. How had that happened? How had that murky world made me its bright star?
Number two Chester Square in Chelsea was the house of my birth. Where the family lived for six years after that. Number two is Blue Plaque: ‘Matthew Arnold: 1822–1888: Poet and Critic: lived here.’ I remember the London County Council blue disc. The house.
My parents had employed a nanny who’d taken me and my younger brother Richard for walks along Ebury Street, marching with the New Guard. From Chelsea Barracks to Buckingham Palace. For the Guard Mount.
Nanny had shown how, in some streets, every fifth or sixth house was a gaping hole. Bomb sites held me in grim amazement. Nanny told us about the Blitz: then the V-1 doodlebug (chugging motor … then the cut, a tense silence, followed by the great bang) and the V-2 rockets (no warning of any sort, just an immense explosion).
We were raised in the shadow of war. My grandfather Frank and father George – F.T. and F.G. – were both war heroes: the Great War for Frank and World War II for Daddy. Neither spoke about it much, but when they did it was frightening. What had gone on – in Daddy’s case at least – was still talked about even when I joined the Scots Guards.
I don’t know how Frank survived. Most junior infantry officers joining anywhere near the start of the Great War were killed well before the end of it. He was wounded three or four times. Each time he went back and fought again. The doctors told him that his cricket was over. He proved them wrong, by becoming captain of England.
Having joined the Scots Guards at the outbreak of World War II, my father fought in Operation Torch, the allied invasion of Libya. At the time, Rommel and the Afrika Korps were being forced to retreat westward by Montgomery’s Eighth Army, following the Battle of El Alamein. Torch was planned to pincer Rommel at Tunis, which it did.
George then fought throughout the long and bloody slog up through Italy, thus ending the war in Trieste, on the Italian–Yugoslav border. By that time he was a major with two Military Crosses (MCs) and a Distinguished Service Order (DSO). He was regarded by the Scots Guards, and many others, then and much later, as the best fighting company commander there was.
With war heroes and bomb sites so close to home I became locked on to all things war. War comics, or trash mags, as they were called, were our schoolboy staple. Even Nanny had an incredible story to tell: her escape from the Gestapo, from occupied Belgium, and certain death in a concentration camp. Nanny was Jewish.
It was ever a surprise that our nursery short-haired miniature dachshund, Sammy, did not have his own tale to tell of wartime derring-do.
Later, Nanny was to further whet my appetite. She gave me adventure books by John Buchan – all about the South African Richard Hannay – and then she gave me C.S. Forrester’s Hornblower novels. What Nanny didn’t tell me was that these books were for enjoyment, to get me reading: that they were not training manuals for life.
The books had no warning label. They didn’t say: ‘Don’t Try This at Home.’
One, I remember, The Jungle is Neutral, by Frederick Spencer Chapman, had a foreword by Field Marshal Earl Wavell that said: ‘What English schoolboy doesn’t dream of blowing up a Jap troop train, crossing a bridge?’ That was the stuff of the day.
We would have Sunday lunch with Pop, our name for Daddy’s father. There would be a crowd of his friends and Daddy’s. Every man there had fought the Germans in one or other world war.
Nanny used to vary our walks. We loved Victoria railway station, filled with steam – bursting with noise and energy. There we would gaze up at the gigantic hissing locomotives. Some of the drivers knew us by name and would take me up into their cab. But, when I was eight, Victoria station took on a nasty new mask. It became the terminus for my train to prep school, North Foreland Court, Broadstairs, Kent (and right on top of the self-same 39 cliff steps used by Buchan).
North Foreland Court was a preparatory institution that took seriously its duty of preparing small boys for life’s unpleasantness. I’m sure that it was the same one used by Evelyn Waugh in his Sword of Honour trilogy. A place where only prefects and headman’s pets could sit on the radiators, to escape the ice.
At North Foreland, the Mann Pressure Machine was on. Full blast.
On da
y one, the headmaster told me how he had taught my father and my Uncle John, before taking me outside alone. I stood frozen as he pointed to the gym roof, all dark-red tiles except for a bright-pink one in the middle.
‘Do you see that pink one?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Now! Look over there.’
He pointed to a distant cricket pitch and pavilion. The square roped off for winter.
‘During the Fathers’ Match of 1929, your Grandfather Frank hit a cricket ball from there, onto the roof, smashing the old tile.’
I tried to look awestruck.
My grandfather and father had both captained the England cricket team; Frank on the victorious tour to South Africa in 1922–3; Daddy doing it again in 1948–9. Then meeting Mummy on the boat home.
I tried hard to be good at cricket, but found myself knocked about in the nets. I just didn’t have an eye for the ball. I hoped that I’d be good at war. The war that we knew was just around the corner. That way, I could live up to being a Mann in one way at least.
Those five years at North Foreland dragged by. They were ghastly. The food! I loathed the place, and could not forgive my parents for sending me there – aged eight; – then Richard – aged seven. We had such a lovely home. What was the point? Then, at last, it was Common Entrance, the exam to go on to Eton.
Three days before the exam results were due, I went to a country house cricket match with Mummy and Daddy. Daddy was playing. Captain, as usual. I was to go back to school alone – by train – that Sunday evening. Daddy took me to the nearby railway station. We walked onto the sleepy two-track stop. The station was a picture postcard: great leafy green trees all round, meadows framed between them. But I couldn’t see that.
If I had failed the Common Entrance exam, I told myself, then I would disappoint. Then what would happen? Flogging? North Foreland had tried plenty. Deportation to the Colonies? Death? The hinterland behind such a failure was unmapped.