Licensed to Kill

by Robert Young Pelton

  The document lists nine reasons why the backers should not count on Moto, ranging from the interference of tribal supporters “who are desperate to get their noses in the trough” to concern that “he may die, or be incapacitated, at an inconvenient moment.” The document then goes on to list ten remedies, the first being that the same forces that brought Moto to power could be used to bring the new dictator down. They would also insulate Moto from getting any opportunity to gain public support, keeping him under twenty-four-hour surveillance and gathering or making up information that could be used for blackmail or negative publicity. Plans to groom the newly installed dictator’s successor were also critical to Simon Mann’s thinking.

  Moto is not the only one who has a noose and a trapdoor carefully prepared for him. The BBC document also voices much concern about how closely “E. K.,” or Eli Khalil, must be managed. The planner’s criticism ranges from “may have exaggerated view of his level of control over ‘M’” to may have “ulterior motives.” The suspicion was that Khalil could be secretly “working for the French, being part of the usual Lebo [Lebanese] conspiracy, which includes diamond trading, money laundering and…an exaggerated view of extent to which oil companies can be screwed for more money, actually the thing most likely to get the USG pissed off.” As a well-documented “middleman” for French and Nigerian oil interests, if the coup had been pulled off as Khalil had wished, he could have become a major player in pushing the country’s upcoming negotiations of oil leases from the Houston cabal toward TotalFinalElf. Just as Lebanese businessman Hassan Hashem is currently the éminence grise for President Obiang, Khalil would have advised Moto from the shadows. His first piece of advice would probably have been to arrest and/or expel the mercenaries and to shift the balance of favor toward the French in granting new leases and security partnerships.

  In this document it appears that Simon Mann does not even trust Niek du Toit. “NDT” comes under suspicion as possibly working for Obiang, or even having his own plans. Since du Toit was partnered with Obiang’s half-brother and national security advisor, a man reputed to have his own ambitions for the top post in EG, it’s entirely possible Niek could have cut his own separate deal that would have included booting Moto, Mann, and everyone else.

  In any conspiracy involving vast sums of money, the deceit involved stirs intense paranoia as each conspirator jockeys for the best position to promote their own selfish interests. Until the coup went down, however, everyone involved had to continue to maintain a façade of trust and cooperation.

  Mann had always tapped into the same people to run his operations, and this time he enlisted the help of former leaders of the 32 Battalion and ex-EO hands like Simon Witherspoon and pilots and brothers Neil and Crause Steyl. Those three and Niek were referred to as the “Million-Dollar Men” because each stood to gain a million dollars from the operation—Niek for his role inside EG and for using his contacts with the Zimbabwe Defence Industries (ZDI) to arrange for a weapons purchase, Simon for leading the mercenaries during the ground operation, Neil for flying the fighters into EG, and Crause for flying Moto from Spain to Malabo. Mann also quickly put together the by-now-standard EO-style complement of Ovambo gunmen from Pomfret, South Africa, recruited by Niek du Toit and handled by twenty-four-year-old accountant and computer programmer James Kershaw. Recruiting a mercenary army wouldn’t be a problem in a place like Pomfret, an abandoned military base and home to ex-members of 32 Battalion. Anyone with enough money could easily raise a thousand-man army in twenty-four hours, making the desolate village a favorite of EO and Sandline in the days when they required manpower.

  According to Crause Steyl, who had been hired to coordinate the air logistics, Simon’s original plan was laid out in his meetings at a resort near Pretoria, South Africa, between Greg Wales, Steyl, and Niek du Toit. As part of his new venture, Niek was to lease two Armenian-crewed cargo planes. They would be painted blue and white with the logo “PANAC,” short for Pan-African Cargo. One was a twenty-passenger Antonov prop plane, the other an Ilyushin 76, a massive four-jet engine overhead wing cargo plane.

  On the night of the coup, rebels would attack and take control of an airfield in the Kolwezi region in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Two DC-3s would fly the sixty or so men and mining security equipment from South Africa to a staging area in Ndola, Zambia, first, and then on to Kolwezi when the signal came that the landing strip was secure. The old Antonov was supposed to fly first from Malabo to Harare, Zimbabwe, to load in the wooden cases of ammunition and weapons, and then on to Kolwezi at the appropriate time. While the plan sounds somewhat convoluted, it was designed to avoid being seen anywhere respectable while loading a weapons cache onto a plane with a small army of obviously irregular soldiers. When the DC-3s and Antonov arrived, men and weapons would all load onto the massive Ilyushin cargo plane.

  The Ilyushin would be carrying a cargo more interesting than even a load of armed men. A collection of luxury SUVs would also be on board and used as an enticement to bring Obiang out to the airport. The president would be invited to accept these as a gift from Niek and his partners. Once on the tarmac, the president and his Moroccan security detail would be overpowered and “detained.”

  Once the airport was secured, the men were to use the SUVs and the minibuses from Niek’s local taxi service to move the mercenaries to secure the military base and police stations. The helicopter paid for with Mark Thatcher’s investment in Triple A Aviation would already be on the island and used as a gunship to deal with rebellious units and as an air ambulance for any wounded in the action. With only about five dozen mercenaries planning to subdue an army of a few thousand Equatoguinean troops and police, the plotters were either naïve, overly optimistic, or more likely had set up a network of local co-plotters who could ensure they would expect little resistance.

  Meanwhile, as the coup was occurring, Severo Moto would be traveling with Greg Wales, David Tremain, and Karim Fallaha in Simon’s South African–registered Beachcraft King Air plane flown by Crause Steyl to Bamako, Mali, from the Canary Islands. Once they got the signal, Moto and the entourage of investors would fly in about thirty minutes after Obiang was neutralized. If everything went smoothly, the Equatoguineans would awake to a new era of enlightened and mercenary-installed leadership.

  According to Khalil, an initial contingent of six hundred Spanish soldiers would be waiting off the coast to be landed by ship as an advance group of three thousand Spanish peacekeepers Moto planned to invite in to help “restore law and order.” Moto would declare a new era of human rights and democracy, while Eli Khalil and his cohorts would become stunningly rich from leasing lucrative oil plots to oil companies.

  Mann was inspired by the beautiful simplicity and profitability of the plan, and quickly expanded the initial idea into a much bigger vision of how Africa could be changed by a small private army. There is a detailed intelligence report by Johann Smith, a former South African intelligence officer, indicating that at one point the conspirators may have been planning a coup hop—starting by taking out the leadership of São Tomé before moving on to EG. Early on, there had also been discussions at Mann’s house with financial advisor Greg Wales and real estate broker Gary Hersham about Sudan and Gabon—both oil-producing countries with upside potential for an aggressive investor with a private army. Mann had actually met with someone to discuss filming the coup with an eye toward a PR program to benefit his future plans.

  Before he could move on to other countries, Mann would have to pull off the EG gig, and there was at least one man who was going to try and throw up roadblocks. Johann Smith, former 32 Battalion officer and contemporary of du Toit, was based in Malabo and considered EG his turf. He had often touted himself as security advisor to President Obiang, though Obiang denies such claims. Smith is one of the many South Africans who hover on the fringe selling their skills to the highest bidders, and he initially learned about Mann’s operation when two other 32 Battalion vets complained to him tha
t they had missed out on a well-paying mercenary job. Smith told the men that if they could try again to get themselves hired, he would pay them for any information they could feed back to him.

  The men managed to pass on enough details for Smith to discover the involvement of Niek, a friend and SADF contemporary. Smith actually confronted du Toit to warn him that the gig was up. Although Smith’s warning gave Niek serious cause for reflection, he and Simon still decided to proceed. Perhaps the decision would have been made differently if the conspirators had known that Johann Smith was assembling a detailed dossier on the impending coup, which he began to forward to what he thought were interested countries. According to Smith, he forwarded a detailed report to government officials in the United States and the UK, including Pentagon official Michael Westphal. The report outlined preparations for the coup, listed the backers (including cell phone numbers), and estimated a date of mid-March 2004.

  On January 29, the British government received Smith’s report, which ended up in the hands of foreign secretary Jack Straw. Straw said later in an official statement, “It was not definitive enough for us to conclude a coup was likely or inevitable. It was passed by another government to us on the normal condition that it not be passed on…. I considered the case and agreed the [Foreign Office] should approach an individual formerly connected with a British private military company, both to attempt to test the veracity of the report and to make clear the [Foreign Office] was firmly opposed to any unconstitutional action such as coups d’état.” Since the coup plan as outlined had all the hallmarks of an Executive Outcomes or Sandline operation, it’s not surprising that Jack Straw called Tim Spicer for more information. According to the British Foreign Office’s official account of the meeting, “the individual concerned claimed no knowledge of the plans.” While the exact level of Spicer’s involvement in the coup is unknown, and there is no evidence he actually was involved, people who know both Spicer and Mann find it highly unlikely that two people with such aligned interests, social contacts, and financial interests did not talk about such a major opportunity. And it surprises no one in that circle that the first person Jack Straw called was Tim Spicer.

  In Straw’s official recounting of the meeting, Spicer was told to notify his long-time friend Simon Mann of the FO’s displeasure and disapproval. However, a source close to Simon Mann recollects being briefed on a different exchange. In this version, Spicer told Mann that he had laid out the full details of the coup and described Straw as pleased: “When Spicer met Simon in February last year, just after he had met the FO, reports are that TS and SM had a good meeting and that SM was not in the least discouraged by TS’s FO meeting, and whatever TS had to say to him put him in a good mood.” Spicer denies briefing Mann after the meeting.

  Jack Straw had initially claimed that the UK government had no foreknowledge of the coup, but a year of media coverage made that position unsustainable, and Straw finally admitted he’d known of the plans five weeks prior to the coup. He had even set up an emergency evacuation plan for UK citizens from the island of Bioko in preparation for any fallout from the coup.

  Someone had given Mann the impression that the UK government had tacitly assented to the coup plot, which buttressed the same sentiment associate Greg Wales had already informed him would be coming from the U.S. government. If any major government had informed Mann’s cabal not to go ahead with their plans, it would have been clear that there would have been no benefit from continuing with the coup. The truth is that no one took any concrete steps to interfere, and the U.S. and UK governments may have simply sat back to watch with interest. Once the operation had succeeded, the PR component would have made it very difficult for anyone to reinstall Obiang or argue that Moto was not a better ruler. After all, the coup was being presented as a persecuted and enlightened government-in-exile mounting a return by humanely deposing one of Africa’s most brutal oppressors. No government could oppose that. Mann kept close the secret that the plot was really about a group of private investors hiring security contractors to take over an oil-rich country.

  By January of 2004, Mann had most of his investors lined up and had received or had pledges for the required funds. Khalil was pressuring Mann to schedule the coup for the third week of February 2004, lest the impending democratic process disrupt their carefully laid plans. There were upcoming elections in Spain, and the plotters discussed the possibility that they would lose Spanish support if the conservative prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, lost his bid for reelection. Also, imminent elections in EG could potentially install a new, democratically elected leader, which would make it more difficult to put a positive PR spin on the coup. Further, December had seen yet another coup attempt against Obiang, this one staged by General Agustin Ndgong Ona, the president’s half brother and commander of the army. Obiang’s premature death or overthrow could shut out Moto’s chance at leadership. Mann determined the third week of February would be the target date for the coup and went to work formulating the operational plan.

  The First Attempt

  By late January, fifty-five men had been hired and were doing house clearing and small squad tactics training at a farm in South Africa. They practiced shooting and breaching doors with wooden rifles in groups of five or so. The training may have seemed a little rigorous for the mining security operation they had been told they would be doing, but the soldiers might not have questioned it for fear of losing the work.

  In early February of 2004, Mann and du Toit traveled to Harare to purchase a stock of weapons. ZDI officials would later say that the men had raised suspicions because their business cards showed the same address—Mann’s for Logo Logistics and du Toit’s for MTS, or Military Technical Services, a company he had started in 1989. Further, it seemed curious that the men would purchase arms from Zimbabwe, since their businesses were based in South Africa—a much larger supplier of weapons—and MTS was a legally licensed dealer. The officials may have not really believed that the men intended to help President Robert Mugabe seize valuable diamond areas in the Congo’s Kolwezi region, but arms dealers aren’t known to ask too many questions. ZDI obviously didn’t care enough about Mann and du Toit’s motivations to refuse $180,800 in exchange for sixty-one AK-47 assault rifles with 45,000 rounds of ammunition, twenty PKM light machine guns with 30,000 rounds of ammunition, a hundred RPG anti-tank launchers with 1,000 rockets, five hundred hand grenades, ten Browning pistols with 500 rounds of 9-mm ammo, and two 60-mm mortar tubes with 80 mortar bombs. James Kershaw flew in from South Africa the next day with $90,000 to make the first payment. The entire shipment was supposed to be ready within a week.

  Niek and Simon arrived at the Harare airport on February 18 with the final $90,800 payment for the weapons cache. They were supposed to pick up the weapons and then rendezvous with the mercenaries to combine forces and commence the coup, but the planned operation hit an insurmountable snag. The plane carrying the mercenaries had hit a bird and broke its nose wheel, leaving the plane a motionless hulk of metal in Ndola. The fifty men who had flown up to Ndola from Wonderbroom Airport in Pretoria were stranded and had to make their way back home. Simon Mann had to put a hold on the weapons, fly from Harare to Ndola to drop off money for the plane repair, and return home in a funk. Agitated by the setback and blaming Crause Steyl for the excessively complicated plan, Mann sidelined Steyl and hired Ivan Pienaar, a South African pilot and former mercenary for UNITA, to develop the new aviation logistics. It was a decision that likely cost Mann dearly, since it would be this new plan that would be leaked directly to the highest level of the Angolan government, leading to the exposure of the coup.

  Second Attempt

  Mann wanted the plan simplified, and Ivan Pienaar did just that—no fancy ruses with luxury cars and no multiple flights and connections. They would use only one aircraft, which would stop to pick up the mercenaries in South Africa, then Simon and the weapons cache in Harare, and then on to Malabo for the coup. Instead of inviting Obiang to the airport
, Niek—through his partner, Armengol—would invite Obiang to dinner on the night of the coup. Obiang would be forcibly held until the mercenary army arrived a few hours later to take over.

  Without the luxury cars, they wouldn’t need the massive Ilyushin cargo plane for transport, and the Antonov was too small for all the weapons and men. Simon made some urgent phone calls and finally located the classic choice for mercenary operations at Dodson Aviation in Kansas—a forty-year-old 727-100, which had been converted from a civilian airliner for use by the U.S. Air National Guard. The converted 727 was complete with a pressurized cargo hold and could carry twice the capacity of the Antonov with a range of three thousand miles. It even had a U.S. flag on its tail.

  Mann bargained hard with Dodson Aviation and agreed in the first week of March to buy the plane for a price of $400,000. Dodson arranged for a U.S. crew to deliver the plane to South Africa. The white plane arrived at Wonderbroom Airport just north of Pretoria at 8:00 A.M. on Sunday, March 7, where the U.S. crew deplaned to go into town, and the mercenaries immediately started loading up. What they did not know was that someone with excellent and exact knowledge of their aviation activities had already contacted Angolan president Eduardo dos Santos on March 4 with explicit details of the coup. On Friday, March 5, Angolan intelligence contacted the minister of the interior for EG and told him to come to Luanda immediately. Manuel Nguema Mba, who has since been promoted to Obiang’s minister of national security, chartered a Falcon jet and flew down for a briefing on the coup plot by dos Santos. Manuel urgently began relaying the information back to Malabo. Even if the mercenaries had managed to make it into EG, they now would have met fierce and violent resistance.

  Back in South Africa, the mood was cheerful. First on board the new 727 was pilot Neil Steyl, an old Executive Outcomes hand and one of the “million-dollar men.” Hendrick Hamman took the copilot’s seat, and Ken Payne was the engineer. The flight crew would be transporting sixty-four men, a pile of supplies, $30,000 in cash for fuel, and $100,000 for expenses. After loading the cargo, the mercenary army took their places in the hold. Altogether there were twenty-three Angolans, eighteen Namibians, twenty South Africans, two Congolese, and a Zimbabwean.