by Simon Mann
The DRC is in the grip of a savage and very haphazard civil war. Another one. The Interahamwe would flay him alive. Once there, Simon’s got to wait … then: rebels attack. Their payback – ammo. That lands with me in the An-12, on their seized Kolwezi airstrip.
Time passes.
I’m growing concerned about the An-12. It should have landed in Douala. Yet there’s no news. I get back in touch with Niek. Why haven’t I heard from them? It’s now I discover Major Fuck-Up Number One. Niek has sent Merz off in the Herkski without a satellite phone. And with very little cash.
Niek’s sitting in Malabo with four satellite phones and a bag of cash. What the hell’s he doing? How is Merz supposed to get in touch with us if something goes wrong? He may be in Cameroon. He may not. We may never know.
Merz is supposed to let me know when the An-12 leaves Cameroon. Maybe he can still find a way to do this. That will be my cue to be taken to Harare International, to check out the weapons. I will be taken by our ZDI contact, Captain Brodie.
There I will meet up with the An-12, Merz and the crew. Load up. Take off for Kolwezi. That’s the plan.
With no word from Merz, I make a decision. I decide not to go to Harare International to wait for them. I want to spend as little time as possible with the weapons in Harare, for obvious reasons. Merz will have to find a way to contact me when they land at Harare, or Brodie will tell me. I can then drive to the airport.
Meanwhile, word from Kolwezi. Witherspoon is at the airstrip. No government forces in sight. Now he just needs to get the rebels ready. When we take off from Harare, I shall send the password. Witherspoon’s cue.
Word from Anthony, in Cape Town. The soldiers are on the planes. They have clearance to take off for Ndola. Pien has bribed everyone in sight. There’s an elaborate maskirovka: they are on their way to do a mining security job up in the north-east of the DRC. The famous Kilo Moto. Solid with gold.
The old Plan B has become Plan D.
They need to fly now. I give them the signal to take off. At least that part of the plan is going smoothly. Once they refuel in Ndola, the South Africans must wait there.
Wait for my Green Light – to fly on to Kolwezi next.
No word from Kolwezi. I need to know from Witherspoon if the rebels are present, armed and ready. I’m trying not to shout. I don’t want to shout. Mugabe’s Gestapo are never far away.
Me: ‘Have you seen our friends yet?’
Witherspoon: ‘There’s a few here. Not many. They don’t seem to know what’s going on.’
Me: ‘Well, you’d best fucking tell them then. Try to find out where the rest of them are.’
Word from Kolwezi. Witherspoon’s voice strained, faint, his satellite-phone signal weak.
Me: ‘Have our friends arrived?’
Witherspoon: ‘There’s just a handful. They don’t seem to know we’re coming.’
I struggle to sound calm. To remain in code. Inside I’m freaking out.
Me: ‘But our friends should be there by now. Where are they?’
Witherspoon: ‘No one seems to know. They might still come.’
I hang up. We don’t even have the weapons on board the Herkski yet. Witherspoon is right. This is Africa. They might still come.
Three hours later. The An-12 should have landed at Harare International an hour ago. I haven’t heard a word from Merz. I call our contact within ZDI. I ask Captain Brodie if he can find out if the An-12 has landed at Harare. He says he’ll call back.
I’m starting to panic. I decide to take a gamble. The An-12 was supposed to refuel in Douala, Cameroon. I need to call the control tower there. Find out if the An-12 arrived or departed. I spend an age being put through to this and that Cameroon airport worker.
As I’m put on hold for the fiftieth time, another phone rings. It’s Brodie. The An-12 hasn’t landed at Harare. They’ve had no word in the tower. Brodie reminds me of the time window.
This sale is over the counter, not under the counter, but Commercial-In-Confidence. Get it? We have been told that the weapons have to be loaded into the plane’s hold before 0500.
It’s now almost ZERO FOUR BUFFALO (0400 HRS). Where the fuck is Merz?
Word from Witherspoon, Kolwezi.
Me: ‘Have our friends arrived?’
Witherspoon: ‘Our friends have not arrived. Repeat. Not arrived. There’s just a few of our friends here. It just isn’t gonna happen to night. Maybe we can risk it with what we’ve got? There’s no government troops.’
Me: ‘All right. Stand by. Don’t leave. Call me every hour, on the hour, OK?’
The An-12 must have been delayed. If it comes to Harare, we can still make this happen. I call Niek. He has the contacts with the Katanga rebels. I tell him to get to work.
Suddenly, it’s 0445. Our hotel room is like a steam room. Except the steam is the smoke from a hundred Marlboro reds. I’m seized suddenly by an unnatural exhaustion. I look at Charles. He calls it. ‘Come on, Simon,’ he says. ‘You know what to do.’
I do know. Put the dog down. Plan D goes to Plan Heaven.
My skin feels raw. Like it’s been scoured with a Brillo pad. I’m not going to bed until I know what’s happened to Merz and the Herkski. I won’t sleep until I find out. I’m worried about them. I’m worried about Witherspoon. I’m worried about me. I’m also fucking furious. Top priority is getting Simon Witherspoon out. He doesn’t know how. Nor do we.
Charles and I get radical. I phone Coebus in bed in Jo’burg. He has no idea of what’s afoot. Nothing about the putsch.
He and Calvin have an emerald mine up on the DRC border, Zambia side. Coebus tells me Calvin is at the mine. He’ll put him on stand-by, with no idea of what he’s standing by for. Coebus doesn’t want to know either – not on this phone line.
‘Go well, eh?’
Charles and I pore over my trusty Michelin 1:500,000 road map. We measure the bush that Simon has to cover. His best way out may be to leg it to the mine. Then he and Calvin can be boschbefocked*together.
It’s after 0700. Word from Merz. Where the fuck have you been?
They’re in Mbuji Mayi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a serious shithole. Flying out to Ndola, if they can bribe a clearance. They have too little money, so they can’t get home.
What the fuck happened to you?
When they landed to refuel at Douala, the An-12 broke its nosewheel. It’s a design weakness. The crew somehow tracked down another Herkski crew. They made a deal for the parts, and that cleaned them out of cash. They jacked up the plane on the runway and changed the nose gear, which took hours.
As they took off again, they ran into overflight clearance problems. Somewhere over the Congo, the An-12 was ordered to land at Mbuji Mayi. The officials there required a bribe to let it leave. They didn’t have more money.
Well done, Niek. Had he sent Merz off with a satellite phone and a few thousand dollars, Plan D could have won through.
Later, with not much fuel on board, and after God knows what bribery and corruption, Merz and crew take off for nearby Ndola. They know we have landing clearances there. And that’s where they’re now stranded. Penniless. They can’t get home. There’s nothing else for it. I drive to Harare Airport, meet Pien and the Hawker, then tell him to fly us north, back to bloody Ndola.
Simon Witherspoon, by this stage, has saved himself a hike in the bush. He had sweet-talked his rebel hosts and thumbed a lift down to the border, then south.
The South Africans, meanwhile, had landed at Ndola the previous lunchtime. They refuelled, then waited for my signal to fly on to Kolwezi. As I was gleefully told when I made it back to South Africa, the most comic scene of the whole exercise had been the sight of three DC-3s sitting all afternoon on the apron of Ndola International, stuffed with 70 former EO soldiers and their kit.
Farnborough Airshow. The Royal Tournament. Covert? For God’s sake!
Then they’d flown home.
2000 ZULU, 25 FEBRUARY 2004: THE INTERCONTINENTA
L HOTEL, JOHANNESBURG INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.
An unusual meeting is taking place. It’s the night of our return from failure. From Ndola. Sat at a long wooden table in the garden, lit by gusting flare pots, are the top team. Charles West, Simon Witherspoon, and others. Merz and the An-12, meanwhile, after receiving cash and a bollocking – both from me – have flown back north to Malabo and Niek – the latter having had the cheek to tick me off for binning the Op.
Here too is Sir Mark Thatcher. He’s staying at the hotel. His natural caution has been unable to overcome his desire to be truly part of the gang. He’s the reason why we’re meeting at the hotel. Tonight I’m flying back to Heathrow from here, to see the Boss. The Op needs more money. Fast.
In London, I meet with the Boss and other investors. By now I know that Amanda is pregnant with our fourth child. She and the children are off to Méribel to ski. The hotshot investors don’t even feign interest in my war story, the death of Plan D. All they want to know is: are we pushing ahead with another go? To hell with the skiing. To hell with the new baby.
‘Jolly good, and all that, Simon… Congratulations! But you are still going ahead as planned, aren’t you?’
I want better than that from the Boss, but I don’t get it. What’s it going to take for me to get that smile? No. No, I do not want a fucking cigar.
The meeting confirms that the Spanish aren’t just privy to our plans. They are a part of our plans. The Boss tells me that, days earlier, the Spanish sent two warships on a show-the-flag cruise down to EG. In reality, the ships had been dispatched in support of our Op. The Spanish wanted them there as back-up. In case we needed it.
But he doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want the promised 3,000 Guardia Civil either. He fears that his post-Coup power and authority will be undermined by Spanish muscle.
Anyway, he wanted to do without those Spanish Men O’War. What he did next floored me. His network fed Obiang a story, via a Spanish official, who is a spy for Obiang. On the Obiang payroll. The spy was told that the Spanish warships had been sent as part of a coup plot.
The well was poisoned.
Obiang swallowed it. He openly accused the Spanish of aiding and abetting a coup. The Spanish, rattled, turned the ships around.
For our next tilt at Obiang – Plan E – the Boss comes up with only $200,000. We need another $600,000 – at least. He asks me if I can find more. I’ve already ploughed $500,000 into the project. My answer is no. The money belongs to Amanda and the children. I have gone too far already.
The Boss offers me a deal. If I put more money into the coup now, then all of my investment thus far – new and old – will no longer be treated as project finance. Instead, every penny of mine ploughed into these operations will be treated as a personal loan.
One of the other investors says he will underwrite this personal loan deal. If the Boss owes me the money, then the money shall be repaid. The debt shall be honoured.
The Boss is desperate for this Op to happen. So desperate that he appears to be growing careless. He offers to use his murky sources. An aircraft. Weapons. He makes the phone calls. Then it becomes clear: these options won’t work. Not within our timeframe.
Shortly after the meeting, the Boss and I talk alone. He looks me in the eye. ‘Simon … I don’t want you and Niek getting into something that you can’t handle.’
He’s gotta be kidding. Like getting shot?
I stare back. Now is his chance. If he wants out, he can say so.
If he wants to tell me that he will do nothing to help any of us – if things go wrong – now he can. We’ll be on our own.
‘You’re behind us all the way, aren’t you…? If things go wrong, I mean…’
‘All the way.’
We shake hands, then hug each other.
‘See you in Malabo.’
‘Malabo.’
*Delirium induced by too much time alone in the bush.
CHAPTER TWELVE
AFRICA: 1997
535 had by now been joined by Tim Spicer, an old Scots Guards friend of mine. Tim had been dying of boredom in the City. Banking. Tony and I rescued him. Tim had two nicknames in the Scots Guards, Schmeisser (after the old Wehrmacht sub-machine gun) and Tactical Tim.
Tongue in cheek, they tell plenty about Tim.
He knew of the pressure I was under. He knew about the huge amount of money – half of it mine – that Tony and Michael, all of them, had to keep throwing at the mining: that or throw in the towel.
Our mining had been all in one basket, Branch Minerals. Then we took out the diamond plays and assigned them to a Vancouver Stock Exchange-quoted vehicle called Carson Gold. Carson Gold was given a name change, DiamondWorks (DMW), and the company’s stock exchange was switched to the more posh Toronto market. Our Luanda friends – brought up staunch Marxist Leninists – were bamboozled by these financial shenanigans. They found them hard to understand. Same here.
Shortly after Andy Smith’s death, Tony asked me if I’d become DMW’s COOA (Chief Operating Officer Africa). I didn’t want to. But I knew that, to make any money out of all this mining, DiamondWorks had to work.
Raising the money, winning the concessions, bringing it all together: this was a beginning, not an end. Tony spelled it out for the team – Tony, Michael, Tim Spicer and me. It was best for everyone if I took on the role of COOA DMW. So I did.
With no training or qualifications, I was suddenly the Boss. The boss of what? On day one, I became the boss of a $20-million budget, and the two main hard rock diamond concessions, Luo (Angola) and Koidu (Sierra Leone), our geologist plus Ian Campbell, assorted workers, assorted machinery. There was no company infrastructure. There were no offices. Most of the key posts were empty.
I fell back on my army training. I sat down and wrote an appreciation. Not a good one, I knew, but it triggered the right thinking. I had to get the two mines built and working or DMW would die. All the time, it was a scramble to find enough money to keep going. The Angola EO contract was finished. Sierra Leone still weren’t paying up. More and more capital was going to money heaven.
Always, yet more capital was poured into the other mining projects – Uganda, Tanzania, the gold mines in Angola; yet more into the alluvial diamond concession, Yetwene just north of our Luo area.
Always, our clients – the Angolan MPLA war machine – were being short changed. They knew it too.
They knew it, but had to keep my Op going.
That was because of the goal we scored. Using a paid spy, we found out the exact details of an An-12 cargo flight from South Africa to the still-fighting Savimbi die-hards. We intercepted the flight, in one of our three L-39 fighters, and forced it down into Luanda.
The cargo of weapons was put on show. The crew were given huge jail sentences. Months later, our spy ended up shot – in Miami – through loose talk on his part. The trick was that this incident – we made sure that rumour had it – was put down to the MPLA having a proper border surveillance and intercept capability. Ha Ha.
But – for many months – Savimbi resupply flights ended. One hundred per cent.
We tied in the scoring of that goal with a cheaper way of waging war. Through my flying training, I had learned how the worldwide civil aviation NOTAM system worked. Notices to Airmen.
I asked João de Matos to order his civil aviation authority to post an until-further NOTAM on the international database. Warning that anyone flying into Angolan airspace without proper permissions was liable to interceptions.
The Angolans were surprised at how well this worked. They hadn’t realised that even dodgy old An-12 Herkskis have owners, bank loans, insurers. A flight that goes against NOTAM can mean invalid insurance. Very worried owners.
Mining was not my natural neck of the woods. Tony came down to Jo’burg to see me. I knew that Tim Spicer was running our next big op: Papua New Guinea (PNG). And doing my old job. Key link man between Tony, the South Africans and the customer government.
The PNG governm
ent had sought outside help. They went to Sparky and Co., who thought it too much like Guns For Hire for their brand name. So they had passed it on to us. For commission.
The PNG island of Bougainville (for the great French sailor and explorer) had been overrun by separatist guerrillas. They had killed policemen and soldiers, as well as civilians. They ran the island.
Not surprisingly, the PNG government could not allow a violent and illegal secession de facto; their sovereignty was at stake. As if guerrillas were to overrun the Channel Islands, then declare independence.
Desire to return Bougainville to the PNG fold was important for another reason: money. The island is solid copper, and home to one of the biggest copper mines in the world.
The plan was that an EO team, with specialised kit, would train up then lead a strike force of the PNG Armed Forces in a mission to bring Bougainville into line. In the meantime, Tim Spicer became such a close confidante of the Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan that he made him his senior defence adviser.
Well done, Tim.
The difficulty was that this love affair put out of joint the nose of the old adviser, a PNG national, Jerry Singirok who also happened to be the Commander of the Armed Forces. So out of joint was Singirok, that he locked up all the South Africans. And Tim Spicer. And the Prime Minister. The General staged a Coup d’État. The fallout from this was widespread.
We failed to make a great deal of money. Not least because we had arranged share options such that, at our call, we could take over the copper mining company that held the Bougainville concession.
Later, Tony and Tim were to fall out badly. Tim was to go on to set up Aegis, later to become the main Private Military Company (PMC) in post-invasion Iraq. But that was later. Tim was to have further adventures from within the Buckingham stable before he bolted.
When Tony came to see me in Jo’burg, the PNG op was getting started. I told Tony that I should be doing it, not Tim. He asked me to carry on with the mining. His argument was that, while it would be better if I did PNG, nobody else on the team could do DiamondWorks. It was the team pension fund. I may have been 50/50 with Tony, but he was the father figure. I agreed.