It becomes clear to me during the meeting that there remains a very high wall between the HART’s very English view of security and Blackwater’s view of a brave new neocon world. While Erik’s dreams of fielding a private army have yet to be realized, the principals of HART have already been down that road. Their military careers in places like Oman or Afghanistan put them in charge of large “levees” or local troops. Richard as an SAS captain and George as the regimental sergeant major for 22 SAS have developed over decades hard-won skills in dealing with insurgencies, dirty wars, and covert operations. While Prince paints a picture of a flashy, high-tech, road-warrior-style military company that could solve any client’s problem by application of sheer brute force and advanced weaponry, Richard and George calmly promote the idea of low-key and culturally integrated solutions. One more time before the meeting breaks up, George repeats his mantra for Erik: “It’s the application of minimum force.”
CHAPTER 12
* * *
The Bight of Benin Company
“We should expect bad behaviour; disloyalty; rampant individual greed; irrational behaviour (kids in toyshop type); back-stabbing, bum-fucking and similar ungentlemanly activities.”
—SIMON MANN IN HIS BIGHT OF BENIN COMPANY PLAN
“It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga.”
—SIMON MANN IN LETTER FROM PRISON
The afternoon attack on the northern Liberian town of Voinjama begins with the booming sound of RPGs being fired from the surrounding jungle followed by the dut-dut-dut of AK-47s. The LURD rebels grab their weapons and begin running toward the sound, while the tattered child soldiers of the Small Boys Unit jump around singing and chanting. The terrified villagers quickly bundle up their goods up in colorful fabrics and start to flee the village.
My security man, Niek du Toit, a forty-six-year-old mercenary and ex–32 Battalion colonel from South Africa, is annoyed at the disturbance interrupting his leisurely reading on the veranda of our dilapidated house. The broad-shouldered hulk of a man with light brown, shortly cropped hair and crooked nose looks necessarily imposing as a bodyguard should, but his appearance contrasts with his easygoing nature and quiet demeanor. Seeing me head toward the action with my camera, Niek begrudgingly puts down his book and picks up his AK to follow. As we reach the contact point, the LURD rebels are cheering over a prone body. They thrust the freshly severed head toward me, mocking the fate of the poor man and making faces for the camera. It didn’t faze Niek to watch the rebels celebrate their victory, since he had probably seen much worse in his more than two decades of bush wars. Later that day, the rebels show up at our house and offer us the head as a souvenir, now fitted with a wire handle conveniently attached to the ears. Niek doesn’t even look up from his book this time.
That evening in the summer of 2002, Niek would tell me about an upcoming gig—something big. The candlelight of our electricity-free house gave our conversation a conspiratorial air as he described a plan to lead a hundred men by boat across a lake from Bujumbura, Burundi, into the eastern Congo to start a war with the Rwandans who had occupied the region. The flare-up would give the Congolese government army justification to enter the UN-controlled area and take back the lucrative diamond fields. Niek was to bring out a stash of diamonds and share the proceeds with the junior Kabila, the U.S.-backed president of the Congo. Under different circumstances, the story could be written off as the delusions of an aging mercenary, but we were in the jungles of Africa, and this was Niek du Toit.
Niek had his coming-of-age, so to speak, as a commander in the South African Defence Force (SADF) and its 32 “Buffalo” Battalion, running long-range missions into Angola to fight against Communist-backed insurgents from the midseventies through the eighties. Niek had gone on to become a professional mercenary, working a variety of different gigs, including time with Executive Outcomes. I casually mentioned that he should contact me if his gig ever got off the ground. When I left Liberia, I wasn’t sure if I would hear from or ever see Niek again, but his turn of fortune eventually had me seeking him out four years later. In March 2004, Niek was arrested, tried, and convicted for attempting to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea. In the spring of 2006, President Obiang finally granted me permission to visit him.
Obiang has had the old, infamous Black Beach prison on the island of Bioko destroyed and has built a new higher-security facility specifically for Niek and the other mercenaries arrested with him. Waiting at dusk at the gates of the new Black Beach prison on the outskirts of Malabo, I can see an emaciated, gray-haired old man in shackles shuffling up the hill toward me. I recognize the broken nose and thick Afrikaner accent, but this is a very different Niek. The shackles around his ankles that have become a permanent fixture have chunks of foam rubber to prevent the skin from being rubbed raw. He says it’s the first time he has been out of his cell in six months. One of his men, Gerhard Mertz, has already died in captivity—reportedly of cerebral malaria—and “Bones” has prostate cancer. The rest all have malaria. At age fifty Niek has thirty more years of his sentence to serve out in this fetid prison, but from the way he looks, it’s unlikely he will last that long. His capture in Equatorial Guinea brought an inglorious end to his career and taught me sobering lessons in my exploration of the crossover between privatized security and mercenary actions.
In the current debate over whether security contractors are mercenaries, those left of center typically insist that “private security contractors” in places like Iraq are mercenaries, while the political right insists that “mercenary” is a pejorative term and only applicable in the most obvious use of ex-soldiers for hire in foreign conflict. The more simplistic dividing line is simply offense versus defense, but the contractual nature and financial need for ex-soldiers to earn a living makes the concept of moving in and out of both worlds not only feasible, but increasingly common. Niek has jumped back and forth between the two separate, but not very distinct, career choices. He was my private security contractor while planning to lead a phantom army into the Congo. He also reportedly had worked on a contract training the Equatoguinean military before trying to overthrow the government. Niek du Toit shows that mercenary and contractor can be one and the same.
One interesting facet of the coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea is that the conspirators involved clearly saw a parallel between their plans, hatched in early 2003, and the invasion of Iraq. After all, the claims of the looming threat of Iraq’s alleged WMDs had fallen apart, and the Bush administration fell back on the argument that Saddam was a brutal tyrant who tortured and killed his own people and needed to be stopped. Like the Bush administration, the backers planned a public relations campaign that would spin the coup as the elimination of a tyrant who’d brutalized his own people, playing down the embarrassing questions of impartial evidence, international legality, and popular support. The backers of the coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea espoused a high purpose, though it would eventually be exposed that they sought money, not the protection of humanitarian ideals, and viewed the violent, illegal overthrow of a dictator as the most expedient way to control the country’s petrodollars.
Equatorial Guinea
The minuscule country of Equatorial Guinea (EG) consists of two separate pieces of land tucked into the armpit of West Africa. The mainland is a rectangular chunk of fetid coastal mangrove and jungle sandwiched between Cameroon and Gabon, while the government and business center occupies the volcanic island of Bioko.
Equatorial Guinea gained independence from their Spanish colonial authorities in 1968, and the first ruler, the self-proclaimed “Unique Miracle” Macías Nguema, quickly assumed the mantle of a stereotypical brutal African dictator. In the eleven years of Ngeuma’s rule, fishing was banned, slavery was reintroduced to keep the cocoa plantations producing, foreigners like the Spanish and Nigerians were expelled, and a long list of members of his government were executed after failed coups and suspected plotting. During his reign, fifty
thousand of his subjects were estimated to have been killed and over a hundred thousand fled the country, further weakening any attempt at creating a viable economy.
In 1979, thirty-seven-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, then the governor of Bioko Province and Nguema’s nephew, overthrew his uncle’s regime. Obiang’s new administration only took four days to try, convict, and execute Nguema. Obiang inherited what was then the poorest country in Africa, but the change in leadership seemed initially cause for optimism as he set about stimulating small-business growth and bringing back foreign investors. Obiang’s treatment of his people was an improvement over the brutality of his uncle, but he did preserve absolute control over the country’s anemic economy and ruled with a tight grip through his own family and tribal group.
Under pressure from the international community, Obiang offered a referendum in 1991 to see if his loyal subjects wanted a multiparty system. Only eighteen hundred of the one hundred forty-eight thousand who voted were against it. The new pluralist constitution in 1992 conceded to allow political organizing, though Obiang has resorted to regular crackdowns on opposition parties to maintain his tight hold on power. EG was subsisting on handouts from aid organizations and sympathetic nations, until one by one they all abandoned the country because of the rampant theft by Obiang and his cronies. In 1993, even the World Bank stopped giving money to the rapacious dictator.
EG’s first major resource find was in 1984 when the natural gas was discovered offshore. The Alba field went into production in 1991, marking the beginning of a change in fortunes for the cash-strapped nation. The Zafiro offshore oil and gas field was discovered in March of 1995. Output from the Zafiro and other fields exploded over the next decade from 17,000 barrels per day to 371,000, ultimately capped at 350,000 barrels today. EG has 1.28 billion barrels’ worth of proven reserves with more exploration under way. The current leases expire in 2007, at which point the oil companies will have been reimbursed for their development costs, putting EG in a position to negotiate a higher percentage of future earnings. The country will also begin to sell its own oil, dramatically adding to its wealth. Its current oil-related revenue is $1.5 billion per year and is only expected to increase. Although geographically small, Equatorial Guinea is slated to be the next big oil and gas powerhouse in Africa after troubled Nigeria.
The oil industry knows the potential of the vast unexplored subterranean world under the Gulf of Guinea in EG’s EEZ, or Exclusive Economic Zone. Oil-starved European nations like Spain and France understand the benefit of controlling oil-rich nations, but Obiang has chosen to look to America and not its former colonial master, Spain, to develop its fields. It is not surprising that the U.S. market consumes three-quarters of Equatorial Guinea’s output, and thus should have a vested interest in the country’s stable output of this precious resource. In the early 2000s, U.S. oil companies kept finding new offshore fields. Houston-based Hess and Marathon Oil as well as Triton Energy, Exxon-Mobil, GE Petrol, and a smattering of resource companies from other nations are quickly turning Equatorial Guinea into the “Kuwait of West Africa.”
To understand the relative scale, EG has one-fiftieth the population of Iraq and consumes the minuscule amount of two thousand barrels a day, though it produces roughly a quarter of the crude that Iraq does. The oil that flows from the offshore rigs is also sweet crude—making it easily refined—and takes a shorter distance to transport to the East Coast of the United States. Today, oil fields in West Africa (EG, Nigeria, and others) provide roughly 15 percent of America’s oil and are expected to exceed imports from Saudi Arabia in a few years.
As it became clear that EG sat on huge untapped resources, the country’s rapidly enriched leadership became a more valuable target for overthrow. Not surprisingly, Africa is the most volatile continent on earth—a place where it is actually more likely that a government will change by coup than by any other means. Between 1956 and 2001, the continent saw 80 coups, 108 known failed coups, and 139 reported coup attempts. Only three countries have not experienced a coup: Botswana, Cape Verde, and Mauritius. In 2003, France allegedly backed an attempt in EG to further the interests of French energy company TotalFinalElf, and to bolster a dispute over French-backed Gabon’s claim to Mbagne Island and the associated oil leases. Today Obiang employs a Moroccan praetorian guard to lessen the chances that his enemies will infiltrate his personal ring of security, but they would be a minor barrier if outside intervention was intent on Obiang’s demise.
The Conspirators
Fifty-eight-year-old Eli Khalil understood the value of West African oil. Born in Kano, Nigeria, as part of the great Shia diaspora from Lebanon, Khalil knew the ways of West Africa and had made big money as a middleman—a type of post-colonial bagman who makes introductions, pays bribes, and closes deals between Western businesses and African rulers. A healthy percentage of the payments would also stick to the fingers of the middleman, making people like Khalil very wealthy men. Though customary in Africa, the practice smacks of corruption to Western sensibilities, and in 2002 Khalil’s profession landed him in trouble. TotalFinalElf (TFE) had hired Khalil to handle oil contracts with former dictator Sani Abachi of Nigeria. In 2002, the French government arrested Khalil in Paris for his oil lease kickbacks between Nigeria and TFE. Though the French released Khalil while the investigation proceeded, they froze his assets, making money tight. Flagged as a dirty dealer and with his lucrative deal with Nigeria under pressure, Khalil turned to a bigger, more insidious way to make money.
The plan sounded simple: overthrow President Obiang and install an acceptable ruler who would give Khalil access to riches without the responsibility of running a country. To enact his plan, Khalil needed three basic elements: a pliable and acceptable ruler, a small, disposable army, and the quiet influx of funds from big-player investors interested in reaping the wealth of Equatoguinean resources. Khalil found the first ingredient in Severo Moto Nsa, a former seminary student and Fang tribesman from EG.
Moto had been living in exile in Madrid for almost a decade, hiding out to avoid punishment for his first attempt to overthrow Obiang. Specifically, Angolan authorities had picked up Moto off the coast of northern Angola in a Russian fishing trawler loaded with weapons and mercenaries and headed toward his homeland. After being ejected from Angola, Moto fled to Spain and applied for political asylum to keep himself safe from imprisonment. In 1995, an Equatoguinean court sentenced Moto in absentia to 101 years in jail for high treason and plotting to kill the president.
Since about twenty anti-Obiang political parties made Spain their base of operations, Moto quickly settled into the life of opposition from afar. From his gilded perch in Madrid, Moto regularly railed against Obiang on the radio and created a website describing Obiang as an “authentic cannibal.” Moto declared that if he returned to Equatorial Guinea, Obiang would “eat my testicles.” Khalil began to finance Moto’s activities in July of 2002, and Moto used the funds to create a “government in exile” in Spain.
Khalil found the second ingredient for his coup in Simon Mann. Simon had a proven history with Executive Outcomes and knew the dangerous business of hiring, deploying, and extracting mercenaries in covert operations. Although he came from privilege, Simon Mann did not come from money. Educated at Eton, with military service in the Scots Guards and coming out as a captain in the SAS, Mann never really adapted to civilian life. Mann had made $60 million from Executive Outcomes’s contract in Angola, but his lavish lifestyle—or rather his wife’s—threatened his nest egg. If Mann had succeeded in the operation, his total personal profit would have been $15 million, enough to keep him and his wife comfortable for some time.
Mann had serious expenses: a country estate in England, a town house in Chelsea, and an opulent rented house in South Africa just down the street from Margaret Thatcher’s son and Obiang’s son in an upscale suburb of Cape Town. Mann and his wife, Amanda (nicknamed “the Duchess”), held lavish dinner parties three times a week catered by a now-fa
mous chef, bought designer clothes, vacationed in the south of France, and lived the life of upper-class English gentry. Mann had made South Africa his primary residence in 1998 when the British government turned up the heat after Sandline’s exploits in Sierra Leone and Bougainville. Many of the investments he made in mining and oil had not done so well, and his fortunes had begun to wane.
Friends have said that by 2002, Simon needed to make a big hit not only to maintain his financial status, but also to keep his hand in the game. Mann had big plans, and big plans need big money. Simon had never given up on the idea behind EO and Sandline, and had spent the previous years looking at the map of Africa with an eye toward reshuffling and reshaping some oppressive and underperforming regimes. Mann loved to fly, and from thousands of feet above, he would look down on the beauty of an Africa without borders and the lush potential of a land yet to be “civilized.”
Mann says in his statements after his arrest that his wife’s real estate agent, Gary Hersham, introduced him to Khalil in January 2003. At that meeting, Mann responded to Khalil’s plan to depose Obiang with full support, although much of the language of violence would be couched euphemistically. According to Mann, Khalil asked him to “help escort Severo Moto home at a given moment, while simultaneously there would be an uprising of both military and civilians.”
Licensed to Kill Page 35