Cry Havoc

by Simon Mann

  Thatcher’s money alone isn’t enough. We’re still short. We’re always short. The Boss coughs up some more, but not enough. He tells me that the rest will come in a few days’ time. I believe him. Why would he pay the first sum if the second wasn’t coming? We start to stand-by the men. Again. Making payments here and there.

  Then, when the money dries up, I have to stop. Again. This has happened over and over. GO STOP GO STOP buggers up everything. It pisses people off. I can’t blame them.

  Our Op leaks.

  I should tell the Boss to fuck off. I know it, but I can’t. I want the top of the mountain. I want to carry out this Op. In my head now is a Hollywood calendar: paper days, blowing away fast. We’re like an aircraft in trouble now. We’re low and slow. We’re on a shoestring for cash. We can’t get anything properly jacked up. We’re in wild haste.

  The leaks that we’re uncovering make it ever more sure that other heavyweight players desperately want us to carry out this Op too. I don’t know quite what’s going on with the powers that be, but there are many signs. Too many. It’s like trying to figure out the English weather: too many variables, too much rapid change.

  So I scan my virtual instrument panel. I weigh up pros and cons. The Boss has always hinted at a US nod and wink. The US is certainly very interested in the affairs of oil-rich EG. They showed their hand years earlier with the BAT Systems fishery protection proposal.

  Obiang considered the proposal – presented to him by a US company from Geddings, Texas. Then a strange story emerged that BAT was in fact a US-backed coup attempt. BAT was promptly aborted. My own information, from several sources, confirms this to be true.

  A source of mine in Washington gleans a telling reaction about EG from a political appointee in the Pentagon. She described Obiang and EG as ‘a multi-faceted fuck-up’. Any change that makes it less of a fuck-up would be good news. So long as it does not damage US interests. Or threaten US citizens.

  I know that the US have been informed of our coup plot by South Africa. Also in that loop is MI6. On top of this, there is a battery of the UK’s Great and Good supporting the coup, all lined up by the Boss. These are well-known people with connections to the highest levels of British politics, business, finance and intelligence. All in on it. All no doubt leaking.

  Other nations are backing us, but more subtly. China is backing the coup. I have doubts about the Chinaman, brought into the game against my orders by a friend who I had asked – out of my desperation with cash flow – to find more backing.

  The Chinaman, having paid his investment over, then turned out to be a selling agent for Chinese government armaments. All he wants to be sure of – he lies – is that the new Equatorial Guinea does not recognise Taiwan, and that EG buy their future kit from him. China’s ambitions to have an African empire are well under way. EG will be grist to the mill.

  South Africa is the issue, not least because South Africa is where we’re based. I brought a spook, Frank Thomas, into the coup plot quite early. I paid him, and he took the money: $10,000. Frank has several jobs. He has been to Nigeria for me, to find out how they will jump when the coup goes down. Whatever is best for their own pockets, is the not surprising answer to that question.

  Frank will go back to Nigeria when the coup happens, to make sure they stay on-side. After that he is earmarked to ride shotgun to those EG locals who will be running security and anti-corruption in the new interim government – that’s the one I’m about to put in power. I hope. I need someone rooting out all post-coup corruption.

  Frank is one of my pairs of eyes and ears – my snout – within South African National Intelligence. (They also have MI – Military Intelligence – but it is under NI that our little caper falls.) I need someone who really knows what’s going on in NI. Someone who can lobby within it if necessary. Someone who is not one of the Afrikaners.

  That someone is Frank.

  But I’m not the only one with snouts inside NI. Niek and his white South Africans all have their contacts in the echelons of government spooks. All in all, therefore, I know what is going on in NI. They know about us. They know about the coup. Niek has shown me SA NI intercepts of his telephone conversations with his wife Belinda and my phone calls to Amanda. NI have more than enough INT to stop us, or to shop us, if that is what they want to do.

  I am in and out of Jo’burg and Cape Town International airports all the time. When in South Africa, I either stay with Mark Thatcher in Cape Town, or at the Sandton Towers in Jo’burg. Everyone knows that.

  NI know me. They know my friends. Usual suspects. Known associates. If NI want this coup to cancel, they can pass that message to me as quickly and as easily as opening a packet of biltong. They don’t. That is good news, because it puts South Africa into the same box as Spain: co-conspirators, but passive, their handiwork clandestine, deniable. South Africa are there for the same reason as Spain: oil. Barrel Boyz. South Africa are the African Empire builders in this century. How the tables turn.

  You see: Niek has told me how clever he has been. A Jo’burg-quoted security company had signed a deal with President Obiang 12 months before. The security company was to supply a personal bodyguard for Obiang, military and security training for EG Special Forces, and help with fisheries and farming. And if that strikes you as an odd mix – farming? – then you don’t know how South African empire-building works. The Afrikaans word ‘Boer’ means ‘farmer’. Like in the Iliad, every one of them is a farmer first.

  This deal was worth $30,000,000, to be financed by a loan to the government of EG, secured against EG oil revenue. The security company in question is well known to be an NI front company. It was set up as such in the first place. So this deal has NI written all over it.

  Niek finds out that the security contract has stalled. It’s dead in the water. As it has been since it was signed a year ago.

  What Niek tells me is that he has negotiated with President Obiang, that Triple Option, our company, will become the agent and project manager for the contract. Cleverer yet, Niek has persuaded the security company and the bank – the original players in the deal – to let Triple Option take over as the management agent. For a percentage. I congratulate Niek on his financial cunning. But he doesn’t know my fears. I fear that Niek has sold the coup down the river. I convince myself this is the case because if we hadn’t surely we’d have all been arrested by know, or told to bin the project. In my mind, I grow convinced that Niek has struck a deal with NI. If such a deal has been struck, it will come to fruition after the coup is successful. After we are in EG.

  What an opportunity for NI!

  They get a piggy-back ride into a successful coup plot. At no risk. At no cost. If it fails, then it wasn’t their coup. It was ours. No money trail to them. No fingerprints. Brilliant. But that’s OK, by me. Because that’s what it takes to get the job done.

  What is not OK is if Niek is smooth-talking me. I am going along with what he tells me because it suits me to do so. The op has got to go ahead. It is being mounted from South Africa. I need NI. For now.

  Forewarned is forearmed, I tell myself. If needed, I’ll sort out Niek and the bloody South Africans later – when we’re set up in EG, when Moto is boss. My plate will be full then. But isn’t that how the West was won?

  I remember when I joined 22 SAS. You had to quickly pick up what was what. They don’t tell you. The idea that you must do whatever it is necessary to do in order to get the job done burns in the core of SAS soldiers. When they say ‘whatever’, they mean it.

  Swallowing a betrayal, and carrying on along the path, in the company of known enemies, joshing them along in friendship, fearing their dagger in your back every step, is just par for the course. Part of the job. If you haven’t got a sense of humour, don’t join.

  My other fear with Niek – founded or unfounded – is that he is running the project as a gravy train. My fear is that he’s spinning it out for as long as he can. Milking it for all it’s worth. We are spending a lo
t of cash up in EG. Genuine businesses are being built, he tells me. Niek owns them, or as good as. What if Niek has taken the stance of some of the South African soldiers in the run-up to Soyo? Could his primary motivation be to keep the cash rolling in for as long as possible? What if he has no plans to carry out the op itself?

  Then things get murkier. A top-secret report falls into our hands. I have to react to it because others know about it. The report has been hacked off the computer of a commercial intelligence officer. The report is intended for SA NI as well as for the clients of the officer actually paying for it: Big Oil, the Barrel Boyz. It gives well-informed details of our plot, although it isn’t sure whether our target is São Tomé or EG. Then I get confirmation from other sources. Sources external to the coup. Copies of this document have been sent to the CIA and to MI6.

  We have a crisis meeting: first with Mark Thatcher at his home.

  Mark is annoying me. All he wants to do is hold long and tiresome meetings about how investors and coupsters will work together post-coup. The divvy-up. The Bight of Benin Company is planned. The BBC. The London Docklands Development Corporation is seen as a model of how to plough through red tape. The legislation around the BBC is to copy that of the Docklands scheme. Business will take no prisoners.

  Then Crause flies me and my PA Anthony down to George, the small city on South Africa’s south coast, where Niek is. We fly in my Aerostar 600 – tail number N90676 – the Porsche 911 of the skies. We laugh. I love to fly with Crause. It’s like the old days. The stakes feel much higher, though. It isn’t just our own lives we’re fooling around with now.

  To everyone’s surprise – except mine – Niek is not fazed by the report. Carry on up the river, he says. It’s as I suspected. We are the troops of NI now. Or so thinks Niek. So think NI.

  Any one of the intelligence agencies – of the US, UK, Spain, South Africa, China – could act against us at any moment. Perhaps they’re waiting. It’s a trap. Giving us enough rope. Maybe they plan to catch us in the act. Keeps it neat. Clear-cut.

  Or perhaps they will allow us to carry out this coup.

  Perhaps it’s something they’ve dearly wanted to happen for some time. Of course, they couldn’t possibly sanction such an act. They can’t do it. But they could sit back and let some other mugs do it for them. Let some mercenaries take the risks. Do the dirty work. Then stroll in after for the rewards.

  What is crystal clear, however, is that we are short of money. We are short of time. Our security is blown. Everything is going wrong. Is it worth carrying on? Or do I cut my losses now and bail out? Am I charging headlong into an ambush?

  If it goes wrong, what will happen to Amanda?

  What will happen to me? Jail and a slow death, or execution?

  I know I should walk.

  Amanda is telling me to drop it, even though she had been in favour: what reasons do I have to carry on? What reasons did I have in the first place? I’d been flattered that the Boss had sought me out. I wanted the craic. This is something to live for.

  I genuinely want to knock a world-class bully like Obiang off his perch. OK, but what am I doing? Bodyguard to Severo: an elected man going home.

  At what point does this become a crime? If I’m walking down the street and your house is on fire, should I refuse to do anything about it until the fire brigade arrives? You wouldn’t mind paying. When I’ve used my men and kit to do the job? Just because I put out your fire doesn’t mean I want the fire brigade abolished. This might sound simplistic but, in my experience, when it comes to the crunch, the international fire brigade – in the form of the UN – doesn’t attend certain fires.

  In Angola and Sierra Leone, it was clear who the bad guys were. It was clear who was suffering as a result. In each case, what was needed was for someone to go and give the bad guys a smacking. Really, it is an act of self-defence.

  You don’t have to be a crusader, trying to change the world. You don’t have to stand up for what’s right. You just have to deal with what’s wrong. Bullying. Tyranny. That’s all.

  For all these reasons, on New Year’s Day 2004 I commit myself to the Equatorial Guinea coup. I’m soldiering on.

  I’m fucked if I’m going to let the Boss down.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MARCH 1995: FREETOWN SIERRA LEONE

  Tony and I stood in the lobby of the Mammy Yoko Hotel, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

  Dressed in our tropical best khaki drill, we waited for Ian Campbell, collecting us to meet the President. Ian had been the country manager for Sierra Leone, for Selection Trust, the old colonial diamond company. Their Sierra Leone diamond concession had been the whole country. Campbell knew every MP, every Minister, every Paramount Chief.

  He was a Paramount Chief. Half the people who mattered in SL had been beneficiaries of Selection Trust one way or another. Many of those had been chosen to become beneficiaries by Campbell.

  After Angola, Sierra Leone felt pleasantly backward, relaxed. The strange English patois of the natives was fun. Instead of ‘Good morning’, they said, ‘How de body?’ They expected back: ‘De body fine.’

  Boasting the best natural harbour on the coast of West Africa, Sierra Leone became a British colony in 1787. After that, it had acted as the main base for the Royal Navy’s 19th-century war against slavery, from Angola northward. The Navy took many liberated slaves from their ships to the Sierra Leone capital – hence its name, Freetown. To me, Freetown is forever linked to Abthorpe in Sword of Honour. Here Guy Crouchback, Waugh’s hero, is unjustly accused of killing his friend, Abthorpe, by means of smuggled whisky. Abthorpe lies sick, in the same hospital as the wounded, unrepentant Richie Hook. Fresh coconut on his bedside table.

  I think of Moscow and the ODABs. The military hospital and my old Russian apparatchik colonel. His signature on the scruffy form that Nick held out. Clipped to the back of a hospital millboard. I hoped we hadn’t killed the old boy.

  Ian drew up in a large 4x4, with driver.

  As we struggled through the town centre, we passed the Freedom Tree. It’s an enormous cotton tree and, Ian told us, has an enormous history. The RN had no choice, often enough, other than to offload freed slaves in Freetown. The Freedom Tree became a clearing house. The freed and their relatives would search for one another. Here people would wait and hope.

  Ian asked if, before we left Sierra Leone, we’d like to see the old Barracoons. It was in these barracks-style buildings that slaves were held before transportation. That was until 1833, when the British outlawed all slavery in their colonies.

  The 4x4 swung out of the traffic noise and bustle. It careered towards an old colonial courtyard, open on one side of four. This open side was fenced by iron palings. Here, too, was a sentry box, a barricade and an entrance way. This was the first layer of an onion of security which, at its centre, held El Presidente.

  The uniforms and AK-47s, the shouting, the saluting, were all spoiled by one thing: too many soldiers wearing shades, mostly of reflective glass.

  For a Guardsman like me, a soldier in dark glasses is not really a soldier at all. This is a dangerous thought for an old Africa Hand like me. But I could not help but see these men as fake. Their guns, however, were real.

  We moved on through the layers of security. Protocol. The sham grew.

  ‘Tony,’ I whispered, ‘these boys have been watching too many movies!’

  That was it: the Presidential paraphernalia was copied from a Hollywood banana republic military dictator. They were aping a Western cultural stereotype of a corrupt and violent African plutocracy. There was no need.

  ‘This is how they think they ought to look.’ Tony stifled a laugh. He had felt it too.

  ‘Let’s hope they haven’t read Black Mischief!’ he laughed.

  ‘White man … yum yum…’

  Campbell looked daggers at us both, hissed us to quiet.

  Protocol seated us in a smelly, stuffy waiting room, not lately cleaned. I leaned back. I tried to enter a dream state
– a time-machine coma – to pass what might be hours. Days.

  ‘Well?’ I quizzed the backs of my eyelids. ‘What am I doing here?’

  It was six months since I’d shouted ‘Baobab, baobab!’ to Giorgio and Nick. Our Il-76 cargo plane carrying the 20 ODAB 500s had landed in Angola. That was August 1994. My elation at delivering the monster bombs had evaporated as the rubber squeaked on Cabo Ledo’s massive concrete.

  All I felt was unease.

  João de Matos gave me his word. He would keep bloodshed to a minimum, he promised. How could he guarantee that? We’ve all seen how military intelligence can get it wrong. How schools and factories and villages can be targeted by mistake. For all our work and training, the system was wide open to abuse. Or stupidity.

  We knew only too well how heartless rebels can use the povos as their cover. Their own people as shields. If a single ODAB were used badly, then the consequences would be apocalyptic. Like setting off a small nuclear bomb. Bought and paid for by yours truly.

  Then – by November 1994 – UNITA had signed a ceasefire. It was an agreement that marked the effective end of the Angolan war. Victory to the MPLA. Never again was there a repeat of the 1993 scenario, whereby UNITA might achieve a military victory.

  Desperate with worry, I needed to know: how had the ODABs achieved this? How, at a stroke, did these bombs put an end to a 20-year civil war, that had cost half a million lives? I had feared the worst. I had feared that my ODABs – despite all our best efforts, and despite all their promises – had done their worst. Killed hundreds. Thousands?

  I found that the FAA had dropped an ODAB close to the UNITA capital, Huambo, a city just west of central Angola. The biggest single coming together of UNITA CIVPOP. The weapon had unleashed a scorching tornado from hell.

  Then I learned that the weapon had been dropped only after public announcements. Learned about the where and when. It had been dropped as a warning. And it was the only one of those bloody things dropped in anger. The fuel-air-mix dragon ODAB had duly shocked and awed.