The Wonga Coup

by Adam Roberts

  8

  Plans and Documents

  ‘Beware, beware the Bight of Benin,

  For few come out though many go in.’

  Old slavers’ rhyme in west Africa

  Throughout the planning of the coup, Mann and the other plotters faced a dilemma. On the one hand, those conspiring in a secret plot should not leave lying around many documents and contracts that might be used as evidence against them if things go wrong. On the other, mercenaries and crooked politicians are a treacherous lot. It is imprudent to leave terms of a contract unspecified and unsigned, or to trust that verbal agreements will be kept later without papers to back them up. Those who hired the coup plotters – the men who did nothing to risk their own skins or freedom, but who were willing to finance the scheme – were not inclined to keep (or show) any documents about the case. But Mann and the others wanted some guarantee of the rewards they would get. That explains why there exists a startling variety of contracts, documents, plans and dreams that the plotters committed to paper. This thickly strewn paper trail, written between July 2003 and the date of the coup attempt, gives a clear idea of their hopes, fears and ambitions.

  The first pair of contracts were sketched out on 22 July 2003, between Mann and Moto. The timing is intriguing: a few days after the coup in Sao Tome, and a few months after Mann and Moto first met and discussed the idea of a coup in Equatorial Guinea. The two documents show a formal relationship has been established between the two men. Moto is the client without much ready cash; Mann is the professional hired to make his customer president of a small oil rich country. Once in power, Moto would be wealthy and powerful. So it is at this stage, when Mann had relatively more clout, that he haggled for a good reward.

  Copies of these documents, in the author’s possession, are signed and initialled by Mann (though not by Moto). In these the melodramatic Mann calls himself ‘Captain F’: it was said that he is fond of code-names. Moto is declared – a little prematurely – as president of Equatorial Guinea. Juicy rewards are promised for Mann and his party: $1 million dollars each for Mann and three other plot leaders (whom Mann would name). For six other junior officers, some $50,000 each; for seventy-five footsoldiers, $25,000 each. In total Mann wanted over $7 million in cash for overthrowing the government of Equatorial Guinea. He and his men would be named citizens of the little country and would be made immune from prosecution for any killing or nastiness they inflicted; they would also be protected against any foreign government that tried to extradite them to face justice elsewhere. Finally, Mann would have the job of providing Moto’s personal bodyguard, in the style of the French mercenary Bob Denard in the Comoros, who controlled presidents by controlling their guards.

  But the second contract, also marked 22 July 2003, promised Mann greater riches. It seems he kept this contract secret (it is marked confidential) from the other coup plotters – perhaps he learned a tough lesson in Executive Outcomes when others, like Tony Buckingham, prospered more from the corporate army than he did. In this contract Mann is brazen. He demands a minimum of $15 million for himself, within days of installing Moto as president. In addition, all his costs are to be covered (indeed twice over) by the client, and anything Mann has bought for the mission – planes, boats, weapons, champagne – is to be repurchased by the client. Any late payments by Moto would incur high rates of interest, while Mann would get a diplomatic passport and an honorary rank in the military ‘as deemed appropriate’.

  That is just the beginning. This secret second deal orders that, immediately on taking office, the new government must begin a ‘phased programme of military procurement and build up’. This must happen ‘as quickly and as aggressively as possible’. Arms buying might even begin before the coup, and Mann expects generous pay for conducting it. Mann, through a company he would form, would be the sole provider of a range of military services. He would also recover money – hundreds of millions of dollars – stuffed in foreign bank accounts by corrupt politicians. He would control private security operations and supply consultancy, procurement and outsourcing services to the government. The men of his presidential guard, a hundred of them, would each get a salary of $6,000 a month, with an upfront payment of $1.8 million ‘required immediately on our arrival’.

  These secondary business opportunities would make Mann and his cronies extremely rich. The second document sets out in black and white what a modern mercenary expects for overthrowing a small government. But it also shows the sort of thievery that many African politicians are routinely found to commit – the only difference would be the colour of Mann’s skin. And while Moto would appear to run the new government, Mann intended to keep as much control as possible. Crause Steyl believed that an admirable goal: ‘Simon is a smart person. He would have made a good shadow president.’ Equatorial Guinea’s new wealth would be milked as furiously as possible. Mann was not just being greedy – his pay would simply reflect the huge risks in doing the job. But it is a damning document, undermining any idea of him as a hero involved in a caper to help ordinary Africans.

  While Mann was busy calculating what he would get paid, another plotter, Greg Wales, was (almost certainly) drafting the first of a pair of remarkable political documents. Wales, the accountant and close friend of Mann who once worked with Executive Outcomes, considers himself a businessman, an academic, a wheelerdealer, a friend of mercenaries (though not a gun-toter himself) and a writer. He likes to meet in London cellar wine bars, usually over several bottles of chardonnay. He wears black-rimmed, half-moon spectacles with a string attached, and frowns frequently when trying to look serious. He usually dons the near-uniform of English expatriates in Africa: crinkled linen suit and pale blue shirt. Like most who were connected to the Wonga Coup, the ex-accountant is prone to rambling lectures.

  He had the job of thinking out the political consequences of attempting a coup in Equatorial Guinea. It was up to him – along with a few others with good political contacts in Africa, Europe or America – to consider the reactions of governments and businesses with interests in Equatorial Guinea. Wales specifically asked the author that he get credit for using the old rhyme ‘Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin’ in connection with the Equatorial Guinea coup plot. He makes no bones about his desire to see Obiang overthrown and Moto installed. He says he wishes the ‘game’ had succeeded. He believes Spain supported it. Wales says he met Moto in Spain in 2003, along with someone from Spain’s then ruling party and an American lobbyist from Washington DC. He found Moto both friendly and ready to ‘talk the talk’ of democracy and economic reform for Equatorial Guinea. Everyone present at the meeting assumed Moto would be president within three months and Wales made it his business to stay close to him. He denies he planned any military operations and he threatened to sue a British newspaper that suggested he helped finance the plot. However, there is no doubt he was involved in the political side of the affair. He says he thought his job was to ‘keep Moto in line’ for the first thirty days of the new president’s rule, and he sees no reason to apologise for it.

  Wales produced two long documents, among several memos, that sketched out his thoughts. The first he wrote in July 2003 (it is dated the same day as Mann’s contract with Moto), and subsequently distributed to others involved in the Wonga Coup – for example, Nigel Morgan recalls Wales giving him a copy later that year. It carries a gracious title, ‘Assisted Regime Change’, which implies some gentle and measured reform. It is the sort of beguiling public relations term that hints at something trivial: a new bus timetable, more assisted care in an old people’s home. But of course it means a violent coup d’état. He passes over the military aspects of the mission, for he is not a military expert, and suggests ways that the new government of Moto (supported by Mann and his plotters) should run the country. Foreign investors are to be reassured. Nearby countries that might be tempted to invade in the ‘immediate aftermath’ of the coup must be discouraged. Diplomats, businessmen, aid workers and journalists are to be briefed
about the coup soon after it happens, as part of a determined public relations campaign. Rival foreign-based ‘pretenders’ to leadership, in other words those opposition leaders who competed with Moto, had to be identified and ‘neutralised’.

  Wales runs through several suggestions of how to do this. He thinks organising a coup on a Thursday or Friday ‘may well be ideal’, as ministers would be in the capital and could be rounded up. The weekend would be a useful time for new rulers to consolidate their grip on power, in time to open the doors of government for business on a Monday morning. The press would be organised ‘to be unanimously supporting the new leadership’, he suggests. International flights and phone calls would be blocked. Wales considers it important the new rulers should seem legitimate, so they would announce ‘impressive plans for social, political, medical and economic improvements for the general population’ while in fact milking the country for all they could.

  Wales’s recurrent point, in conversation with plotters and in his documents, is that taking power is quite a different matter from keeping it. Projecting a good image to the world is necessary to discourage an invasion or counter coup. The example of the reversed putsch in Sao Tome was obviously fresh in his mind. Crause Steyl recalls: ‘The guys who did that coup, we spoke to them. They said it [the military bit] was pretty easy, but we were supposed to look at the politics. That was Greg’s job.’ And Wales made a serious point: the soldiering team, led by Mann, had also to think beyond military affairs. That is a recurring theme in the Wonga Coup. Mann, Nick du Toit and others had the military means and experience for a successful coup, but also they needed to consider the politics of modern Africa.

  Wales worked hard on this theme throughout 2003. Mann’s bank statements showed he passed money to Wales (and to a foundation that Wales controlled), paying him to travel to the United States to gauge reaction of American officials to a coup. He made some sort of contact, probably at a conference on military companies, with Theresa Whelan from the Pentagon and with representatives of an industrial lobby group for private military firms. Wales also considered taking Moto to Washington DC to introduce him to officials, academics and the media. He approached an American lobbyist called Joe Sala, who said a four day programme of such introductions could be arranged for $40,000. Phone records later showed that Wales constantly phoned American contacts in these months, for example logging more than thirty calls to Sala in the year to February 2004 (when the phone calls abruptly stopped).

  Wales boasted to all who would listen that the CIA had paid him to do a survey of Equatorial Guinea in the middle of 2003, and he endlessly claimed (though it is never possible to tell what was bluff and what might be true) to have secret and important contacts in the American administration. One South African security consultant later complained that Wales hired him to conduct an ‘intelligence survey’ of Equatorial Guinea, to see what size ships could enter the harbour in Malabo and to see how carefully cargo was monitored on those ships. He said that Wales owed him $28,000 for the survey and, when pressed for money, the South African was told to contact Mann. Wales would later brag, usually after a bottle or two of chardonnay, of having contacts with Scott Fisher from the State Department, Herb Howe from the National Security Agency, as well as assorted lobbyists and public relations people in Washington.

  By the turn of the year, Wales’s ideas (and presumably Mann’s, too) had expanded to something grander in Equatorial Guinea. He proposed forming a company, controlled by Mann and his closest plotters, to run Equatorial Guinea with Moto as a puppet leader. The English accountant had long liked to dream up plans and models for how to run failing countries. He says he has written other proposals for other companies modelled on the old buccaneering firms that underwrote British imperial expansion in India and Africa. He thinks Somalia and Gabon should be run by boards of directors, not by governments or warlords. So he wrote a lengthy document, the Bight of Benin Company document, describing how such a company could take power and run the oil-rich west African state. Johann Smith believes the document shows the coup plot ‘was pure neo-colonialism, to put Moto in place so they can remove him at any time. Simon would have been the president’s security adviser and his company, the Bight of Benin Company, would have controlled it all.’

  Wales was following old models. Much of Africa, at least the British-run parts, was colonised by private companies. The first, as early as 1618, was a ‘Company of Adventurers of London Trading to the Ports of Africa’, also known as the Guinea Company, that dominated British trade with the continent. By the eighteenth century the Sierra Leone Company was founded with the part-philanthropic goal of snatching a corner of west Africa and repatriating ex-slaves from London. And in the Victorian era it was profit-seeking firms whose employees wielded machine guns and conquered land and people all over Africa. In the south, Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company – and its mercenary army – overwhelmed much of what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia. In east Africa Frederick Lugard (a soldier-of-fortune turned colonialist) of the Imperial British East Africa Company conquered territory, then moved to west Africa to help another British firm colonise land along the Niger river.

  The plotters of the Wonga Coup evidently hoped to follow in this long tradition of procuring wealth in Africa through the barrel of a gun. The Bight of Benin Company document – which Wales admits he wrote – along with memos from plotters’ meetings, show a preoccupation with oil firms, the untrustworthiness of fellow plotters and the risk of counterinvasion, perhaps from Nigeria, after the coup. It is dated January 2004 and one copy (a version now in the author’s possession) was found in Mann’s South African office later that year.

  The Bight of Benin Company document shows the plotters fretting that oil firms may not play ball after the coup. If the oil revenues stopped flowing, what was the point of taking control of Equatorial Guinea? They knew that regular, direct flights existed between Malabo and Houston – an indication of the growing American interest in Equatorial Guinea’s oil as so many American workers needed to shuttle across the Atlantic. They pondered which firms owned which blocks (areas where each firm works) in the sea around the island country. And even if the oil continued to flow, how could they squeeze more revenue? They knew any attempt to renegotiate deals with oil firms would be difficult: such haggling is heavily frowned on once production is underway. An earlier effort by Obiang to do just that, over the productive Zafira oil field, ‘went down very badly in the industry’, says an oil expert. But ‘the coup makers would have thought they would allocate new blocks, or would form little oil companies of their own, then trade them or farm out rights to other firms’, he suggests.

  The plotters knew not to provoke American displeasure. Messing with the superpower’s oil interests might be ‘what gets the Marines coming in’, hints a note on one agenda. Reassuring the American government would be necessary early on. The Americans might be assuaged if lucrative jobs were offered to American private security firms. In one document, the plotters suggest the firm Military Professional Resources, Incorporated (MPRI) might get the job of guarding the new president. Wales reported to his colleagues that the Pentagon’s Whelan had been enthusiastic at their meeting in 2003, at least about the general idea of American security firms getting more business in Africa.

  The Bight of Benin Company document makes clear that the plotters hoped to control Moto as a puppet leader, even taking charge of who has access to the new president and what official contracts he was allowed to sign. But keeping such control would be difficult, especially given the likely divisions that would appear between the plotters themselves. The two, colourful opening paragraphs of the document illustrate that point:

  The 2 most potent general threats are:

  1) as it is potentially a very lucrative game, we should expect bad behaviour; disloyalty; rampant individual greed; irrational behaviour (kids in toyshop style); back-stabbing, bum-fucking, and similar ungentlemanly activities.

  2) if the result is not se
en by the outside world as noticeably better than the current situation, our position there in other than the very short term, will be hard to sustain; and our involvement will be much more likely to be the subject of unfavourable scrutiny.

  They did not trust Moto, even though he was their client. Once he was in power, the men who led the coup would become relatively weak. Moto might think ‘whoever puts him in power can be a disposable syringe’. So he needed to be kept weak enough to depend on those who put him in office, but strong enough to keep away others who wanted power. It would be a difficult balance to strike. Moto might denounce his mercenaries as ‘a threat to him, re-writing history to claim that we were working for the previous mob (our current strategy making that easier)’. Mann, Wales and others had good reason to worry. Angola’s government had eventually turned against Executive Outcomes in the late 1990s. Its president, Eduardo dos Santos, privately asked the American president, Bill Clinton, to call on him publicly to throw the mercenaries out of Angola. Dos Santos ejected the hired guns while appearing to do so regretfully. In similar fashion, Moto might try ‘getting oil co’s (eg) to pressure USG [United States Government] to push for our removal’.

  Moto might be kept weak, however, if he were unpopular. So there should be no elections for the new president, according to the Bight of Benin Company document: Moto ‘needs to achieve power by coup or putsch; not by public acclamation on return, or by political dealing after it’. The mercenaries would monopolise violent force (the definition of the modern state), making sure they paid and controlled all important military men including the ‘Army/Navy/Air Force, Military Equipment, Intelligence, Palace Guard … Customs, airport and port security; maritime security …’ They would also try to take charge of government finances and foreign policy. As they plundered they would nonetheless seek ‘the moral high ground’ by seeming to promote open government and fighting corruption. And if Moto eventually proved too troublesome, they would groom a successor-in-waiting who could be imposed on the country by the mercenaries’ military might.