I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  Whatever motivated Melles, it was not a minority’s resentment over dashed hopes and blighted prospects. Born in Eritrea, he had moved to Ethiopia at the age of nine and spoke fluent Amharic. Many of his friends were Ethiopian and he had completed his studies in Addis, winning qualifications that placed a successful professional career in Ethiopia within his grasp. But, in his heart, Melles never felt anything other than Eritrean. Having secured a new job in Asmara, the 27-year-old embarked on a life of self-conscious, careful duplicity.

  ‘I moved into the Keren Hotel and there I used to spend my time with Amharas, very rarely going to see my relatives. I did my best to make friends amongst the Ethiopian professionals staying at the hotel, to blend in, to camouflage myself. I’d talk about a girl in Addis I was thinking of marrying. One of them, an Ethiopian bank manager, became very fond of me. He used to say: “You look like a true Ethiopian,” thinking that he was complimenting me, when instead he was denying my nationality.’

  A plan had been gestating in Melles’ mind for years, ever since he had joined an ELF secret cell in the Ethiopian capital and started ‘liberating’ small drug consignments from Addis hospitals and the German pharmaceuticals company where he worked. It was the reason he had applied for the job as regional manager of Asmara’s Central Medical Store. But he had transferred his allegiance in the meantime, joining the EPLF, and he wanted the rival movement to benefit from a haul only someone enjoying his level of access could engineer. So he stalled. ‘I was giving the ELF all sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t be possible to do anything: security was too tight, the bureaucracy was very complicated–in fact, I didn’t want to continue working with them.’

  The Ethiopian security forces had established what seemed a tamper-proof system. Across the street from the Central Medical Store lay an Ethiopian army garrison, complete with watchtower and roving spotlight. Military and police guards were stationed at the store’s high gates. All employees were searched on arrival and departure, and Ethiopian agents had been assigned to work undercover at the site. No consignment could leave the premises without a signed approval from Asmara’s Ministry of Health and Eritrea’s military headquarters. When a delivery was dispatched to the airport or a regional hospital, it did so under escort.

  Melles knew, better than anyone else, just how enticing the contents of the warehouses were for a guerrilla movement beginning to take heavy casualties in the field. Their stores held more than routine hospital supplies. Earlier that year, he had been involved in a drive to prepare surgical sets for the Ethiopian army’s frontline medical units, ahead of a major military offensive planned against the EPLF. The offensive had stalled in its tracks and the surgical sets had been sent back to Asmara’s central store and placed under lock and key. There they sat, waiting for the next military emergency.

  Working alongside one of the EPLF’s underground cells, he spent more than three months preparing the ground. Nothing must be left to chance. As manager, he had access to employees’ personal files. ‘We knew that there were security people working at the plant and some were armed. I studied the files of every member of the Central Medical Store–I think there were 50 or 60–working out who was likely to be an Ethiopian agent and who was likely to be sympathetic to the Eritrean cause.’

  The files of those deemed possible threats were smuggled out of the site and their photographs copied. Some staff were reallocated, buttered up by Melles–sympathetic boss par excellence–or sent on carefully-timed vacations. ‘I had to do some manipulation. I changed a storeman I didn’t have confidence in and put in someone I was less suspicious of, a relatively simple person. I encouraged my driver to take a vacation and sent my secretary off for a few days so I had access to the various documents.’

  Keys to offices and storerooms were copied. An old form from a hospital in Keren requesting supplies and bearing all the necessary official signatures was smuggled out to the waiting EPLF. When it came back, the word ‘Keren’ had been removed and replaced with ‘Axum’ and the forged form was being brandished by a member of the fedayeen, playing the role of an Axum pharmacist with a rush request on his hands.

  ‘We arranged for him to come on a Saturday at about 11.00, because the store closed for the weekend at 12.00. It meant staff would be in a rush to leave the premises and any news would be unlikely to leak out until Monday. We staged an argument in front of the Ethiopian guards. I was saying, “It’s late, how come you’ve waited until now, it’s Saturday and we close soon.” He was saying “Please, it’s really urgent, a charter plane is waiting at the airport to take the consignment to Axum this afternoon.”

  While the two men bickered, soldiers bearing standard-issue Ethiopian weaponry drove an empty truck through the gates of the store. They looked like Ethiopian troops, providing the obligatory escort. In fact, they were EPLF Fighters, who had slipped into Asmara in the previous days and donned stolen Ethiopian uniforms.

  While his staff prepared supplies for the Axum hospital, Melles led employees to another storeroom where the unused surgical sets had been stockpiled. ‘The EPLF had sent me a list of requirements from the field and I’d already worked out exactly which boxes we needed.’ When the Ethiopian guards came to check all was in order, they saw porters loading a truck, a waiting military escort, and the standard paperwork. Maybe the fact that the regional manager was proposing to accompany the consignment to the airport in his own car seemed a little unusual. But, hey, this was a rush job, it was long past midday and the manager’s driver, as it happened, was on vacation.

  Melles’ next challenge was to shed the porters before they registered no charter flight actually existed. Stopping the convoy en route, he pretended to call the airport, emerging exasperated. ‘I came out and said, “Today’s flight has been delayed. It’s not leaving now until the evening, so we don’t need to unload immediately.” Solicitous as ever, the boss drove his porters back to town. Behind him, the truck promptly veered off the airport road and plunged into Asmara’s back streets, finally screeching to a halt inside a private compound.

  Now might have seemed a good time to exit the scene. But Melles pushed his luck a little bit further. ‘There was some important equipment–anaesthetic machines, microscopes, antibiotics and additional drugs–that I wanted.’ Knowing this would be his only opportunity, he was determined to wring as much from it as possible. But first he needed to know whether it was safe to return.

  This was where the months of preparation really paid off. No one noticed the group of 12-year-old boys, the kind of mischievous teenagers you can see playing ball on any Asmara street corner, loitering at the bus station opposite the Central Medical Store entrance. They had been given a copy of a group photograph of laboratory staff, with suspected undercover agents clearly marked. Since the morning they had been quietly checking the faces of workers going for lunch, logging who had left and who remained. The coast, these teenage informers told Melles, was clear. The suspected agents were off the premises, and no alarm had been raised.

  Melles and the Axum pharmacist staged another fierce quarrel for the benefit of the Ethiopian guards at the gate. ‘I was saying, “How come you don’t have your own car?” And he was saying, “I couldn’t organize one, can’t we use yours? This is an emergency.” So I said: “We don’t normally do this. But, since it’s for the nation…”

  ‘A month before the mission the Ethiopian sergeant had been fined for being involved in a car accident. He had gone around the staff asking for help to pay the fine and people had been contributing one or two birr. I had given him 60 birr and said “You’re an old man, my father.” So we had built up a relationship and whatever I told him, he would have believed. I remember that he even told the soldiers in his charge to help us load my car.’

  Incredibly, Melles was to return to his workplace one last time, to explain to the Ethiopian guards that since his car had developed a fault during all the toing and froing, he was taking it to a garage and it would not be returned until Monday. One
senses success had gone to his head. He was almost courting discovery.

  During the night, the fedayeen pushed the car in silence to the outskirts of Asmara–driving a vehicle with government plates always drew curious eyes–then drove it away. While EPLF forces on the edges of the city opened fire to distract attention, the drugs and equipment were smuggled out and Melles crossed the frontline, heading for the guerrilla training camps of the Sahel. His cushioned life as a middle-class professional was over. By the time the Ethiopian authorities discovered the sting, the EPLF had taken delivery of a consignment of antibiotics, microscopes, surgical blades, stethoscopes and surgical equipment worth at least 280,000 birr, or $140,000 –a considerable sum in those days. ‘The EPLF was still quite small at that time, so this amount meant a lot.’

  Melles was to use many of those stolen supplies setting up the EPLF’s laboratories, which served the medical units that went into combat alongside the Fighters. He trained up scores of health workers, teaching them how to take samples, prepare petri dishes and test blood. He proudly demonstrates the fold-away microscopes, made of lightweight plastic, patented by the EPLF. ‘Eighty per cent of lab technicians in Eritrea today are former Fighters I taught in the bush, and that fact gives me huge satisfaction,’ he says.

  If Melles never needed his cyanide pills, he still paid a high price for his fateful decision. Stationed in the Sahel, he was not to see the city, his old friends and family, for another 16 years. ‘My father died without me ever seeing him again. With my mother, I was luckier. We met at independence.’

  Looking back on his 27-year-old self, the older man knows he would not now be capable of such deeds of sangfroid. Not through fear, but because of the gritty appreciation of statistical probabilities that comes with experience. ‘When you are young you only see the positives, you underestimate the risks. At this age I wouldn’t do it, not because I wouldn’t want to die, but because I’d calculate the odds and think we probably wouldn’t succeed. When you’re young you calculate the odds in a very different way. You think you always stand a chance.’

  He feels little regret about the aspect of the operation that would trouble some the most: the small deceptions practised towards colleagues, apparent friends: his bank manager buddy, the old sergeant who helped him load the car, the secretary whose keys he copied. Looking back, did he ever feel he’d shown a certain ruthlessness?

  ‘You know, a lot of people at the time made what seemed to the enemy like ruthless choices, but from our point of view represented sacrifice. Many of my contemporaries who went to the front left behind wives and children. They were the family’s only breadwinners, yet they abandoned them. Naturally, you feel bad. But once you are committed to a certain course, it becomes easy.’

  The Ethiopians did not make the mistake of trusting an Eritrean with such a key post again. When the new regional manager was chosen, the job went to an Ethiopian, not an Eritrean. Long after the mission, an acquaintance told Melles his name had come up during a conversation with the bank manager he once befriended at the Keren Hotel. ‘They got talking and he told my friend: “After Melles, I will never trust anyone again. What he did shows you can never truly know anyone until they are dead.”’

  Hunched over a desk in his Asmara office, Asmerom1 is leafing through a drawer in search of some photos he just knows are in there, somewhere. Waiting, I’m finding it hard to concentrate. There’s an old girlie calendar hanging behind his head, nearly covered up by more recent accumulations of posters and adverts. But my eyes keep being drawn to one hairy pudenda peeping through. This is very much a man’s world. The desk is scattered with spanners, spark plugs and other debris. It’s not really an office at all, more an offshoot of his workshop, a place where tea is drunk, paperwork signed with oil-smeared fingers, prices negotiated and machinery examined.

  ‘Here they are,’ says Asmerom and I drag my eyes away to see he is brandishing a handful of snaps. The stack contains pictures of him, smart and besuited, at his wedding. But he whips through those, as though they are of no great interest, then stops to linger over the ones that really matter. Here he is, in his late teens, photographed in black-and-white with a group of 20 classmates. It is the early seventies, and they all sport grandiose flares. Collars stretch as far as breastbones, these are funky young dudes. Arms are draped lazily over shoulders in a moment of easy male camaraderie, grins are wide and relaxed. ‘There, that’s me,’ says Asmerom, pointing to the middle row. There is a long pause and he sighs. ‘I am the only one of that group that is still alive.’

  Other pictures. Asmerom as part of a group of three, taken in a studio. The flares are still in evidence, the hair styles verge on the Afro, but the clothes this time are less modish and more practical–clothes designed for long treks and nights spent sleeping rough–and the expressions are solemn; no smiles now. Another group of three, this time dressed in camouflage and snapped outdoors. Each young man is holding a rifle in one hand. With the other they embrace, but this is not the affectionate embrace of untroubled youth. Their arms are rigid, three hands clenched in a gesture that needs no words. It spells, unmistakably: ‘All for one and one for all.’ ‘To the death.’ ‘All gone, all gone,’ mutters Asmerom, with a shake of the head.

  He lingers longest over a snap of a tall, rangy young man in camouflage, clutching a rifle. It is not a good photograph. The young man is in mid-stride and half his body is out of the picture, while the image is so fuzzy you can barely make out his features. But the photo is clearly a favourite–as Asmerom leafs through the pile, copies of that blurry image keep reappearing at regular intervals, outnumbering even the wedding pictures. ‘That is Abraham,’ explains Asmerom. ‘He was a great fighter. He spoke French and Italian. Very bright, very handsome, a really intelligent man.’ Were you close? I ask, although the question barely needs posing. ‘Yes. He was my best friend. He was a great man.’

  Mournfulness clings to Asmerom like strong aftershave. When we meet later for coffee, he chooses possibly the quietest venue in Asmara, a tiny hotel veranda facing the back streets. He avoids cafés or bars where he might bump into people he knows. ‘I don’t like meeting people. To be honest, I don’t feel safe in crowded areas. We aren’t the only people who achieved independence in 1991, you know, and people have long memories. It’s best to keep your mouth shut.’

  He prefers the intimate tête-à-tête, lighting up at the chance to talk to a Briton about London. London, where he lived in Tower Hamlets and worked as a store manager and mini-cab driver; London, home of the Hope & Anchor pub in Brixton, where he learned from his Irish girlfriend the devastating effect of mixing beer and spirits. He made friends there who had no idea where either Eritrea or Ethiopia were on the map, and couldn’t care less. London had bestowed upon him the gift of anonymity, allowing him to forget he ever belonged to the most lethal breed of fedayeen, the hit man.

  Not everyone is suited to undercover work. It demands more complex qualities than pure soldiering. Physical courage, that quality most human beings spend their entire lives never certain they possess, is not enough. A level of guile, an ability to think on one’s feet, is essential. The empathetic capacity to befriend the enemy, to feel in one’s bones–for a half-hour or an afternoon–that one actually is the enemy, with all the enemy’s beliefs and opinions. And it helps if you can hold your liquor and your tongue.

  Asmerom possessed those dark skills. Crucially, he had also grown up in Asmara. In a city of less than 500,000, where it was scarcely possible to walk out of the door without bumping into an old acquaintance, only someone with an established network of loyal friends could hope to be a successful fedayeen, swimming like the Maoist fish in waters of silent public support. ‘Assassinating in Asmara at that time was very easy because the people were with us,’ Asmerom says, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. ‘Half of Asmara knew I was fedayeen but they didn’t say anything.’

  He was recruited by Abraham Tekle, a classmate who had joined the ELF. Just 18, Asmerom was a
we-struck to see how Abraham’s physique had changed since their last meeting, the lanky student transformed into hardened fighter. He, too, wanted to be reborn. His baptism was a night attack on the High Court, where the Ethiopians had placed a stash of confiscated weaponry on display. Armed only with knuckle-dusters and home-made bombs, Asmerom and his friends knocked the guard unconscious and snatched 28 pistols and a submachine gun.

  Asmerom slipped off to the front to do his military training. When he returned, he teamed up with Abraham to begin his new life as an undercover agent, a man constantly on the move. ‘I used two fake names and had forged ID cards and documents. If I slept in northern Asmara one night, I’d sleep in eastern Asmara the next. One day I would dress like a businessman in a suit, the next I’d look like a workman in overalls and I’d have dyed my hair, or be wearing a wig. You made sure never to write things down. And you used different entrances and exits each day, because you knew that the Ethiopians were watching every zone. They were very good at counter-espionage.’

  He was always armed. Asmerom shows me how he used to keep a loaded pistol on one side of his belt, held snugly in place with a knotted shoelace, and a Russian or Chinese grenade on the other. A sweater, pulled down low, concealed the tell-tale bulges. If facing capture, the fedayeen were expected to turn such weapons on themselves. ‘If there was no prospect of escape you shot yourself. A lot of my friends killed themselves that way. You knew you would be questioned and you might give names away. You have to be very bright, very systematic, to resist cross-questioning, and the Ethiopians would kill you in the end anyway. So, for the sake of the others, you killed yourself.’