From SAS to Blood Diamond Wars

by Ross, Hamish

  However, at the time of these events in February and March, sensationalism in a story about mercenaries had not been created. On 11 March, in an interview on BBC, High Commissioner Peter Penfold said that Britain had made no demands on President Kabbah in exchange for British assistance in restoring the civilian government.31 In response to a question, he denied that he had put Kabbah in touch with mercenaries or had helped in the recruiting of mercenaries. It was a question that would recur.

  Deputy Minister of Defence Sam Hinga Norman had been a Hercules with a clear vision of what had to be done to oust the junta through a co-ordinated effort of the external military force of the sub-region supported by local militia. Some months after the restoration of the government, he was asked in an interview. ‘Shortly after the AFRC coup, many people ran away. But you, rather than do that, put your life on the line. Where did you get that inspiration from?’ Hinga Norman’s reply in essence is the timeless motive of the patriot, who takes up arms to defend the homeland.

  Ah … I got the inspiration from the simple fact that this is the only country that I have. If I lose it, my very belonging – I will be … be dispossessed of belonging to a nation. Even the bird perching on the tree would be better than me.32

  He too was asked about mercenaries, and the question was put to him citing Executive Outcomes as an example. Hinga Norman’s reply is thought-provoking: he said that Executive Outcomes were not mercenaries. He argued that if the definition of a mercenary is a foreign national being paid for what he does, what is the essential difference between paying a professional doctor or teacher to come and work in the country, and paying professional soldiers – provided they are requested by the constitutional government.33

  Individuals no doubt had their own reasons for working with private military companies − Bokkie’s crew were single-minded, and they kept a sense of self-respect for what they did. Reflecting on it later to Fred, Juba wrote:

  The two of us did what we did in Sierra Leone and Liberia because we felt for the people that suffered, and there were only us from the air side, that were involved, that truly believed in what we did.34

  On 10 March, President Kabbah made a triumphant return to Freetown. Thousands of people assembled at the national stadium. Bokkie ferried the VIPs there and remained in the stadium throughout the ceremony. Its crew were proud of the moment when their craft was photographed and filmed by the world’s media. Juba later had reason to remind high officials.

  Often the statement has been made by senior Government and ECOMOG officers that the helicopter played a major role in the February 1998 offensive against the rebels, and without the helicopter support, the offensive would not have been the success it was.35

  It might be thought that in their sense of commitment, Bokkie’s crew, in their enthusiasm and fondness for the helicopter, became influenced by the animism that lies not far below the surface of monotheistic faiths in West Africa. But that belief holds that spirit resides in all things in the natural world; so it surely could not apply to a machine? Oh, but this was a machine with personality, this was Bokkie.

  Chapter Seven

  Carrying the Can

  For the manner in which men live is so different from the way in which they ought to live, that he who leaves the common course for that which he ought to follow will find that it leads him to ruin rather than to safety. For a man who, in all respects, will carry out only his professions of good, will be apt to be ruined amongst so many who are evil.

  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  A random sample of those with long service in a hierarchy like a bureaucracy or the military would settle for the proposition that when it comes to the crunch in subordinate-superordinate relationships a proper bastard is to be preferred to a proper shit. The former is readily identified, and patterns of behaviour anticipated − not that the type is by definition unable to respect fairness. The latter, on the other hand, may not be instantly discernible, but invariably comes to light when a crisis grips the organization, during the resolution of which some strive desperately to gain praise or, even more vitally, avoid censure − and unlike the former, this type is consistently contemptible.

  Such considerations were a world away from West Africa in March 1998; so not long after President Kabbah’s triumphal return to Freetown, when Bokkie was a focal point in the large stadium, and the loudest chant going round the huge crowd was, ‘Khobe; Khobe; Khobe’ (in tribute to the ECOMOG Task Force Commander), and the second loudest chant was, ‘ninety-eight point one; ninety-eight point one’1 (the wave length of Radio Democracy, funded by the British government at the urging of its pro-active High Commissioner), the last thought that could have been on Peter Penfold’s mind, when he received a summons to return to the UK, was that he was heading into a maelstrom which was engulfing the Foreign Office, in danger of dragging political careers below the surface, and would test the moral fibre of ministers and officials.

  Quite the opposite: it would have been reasonable to expect a discussion and decisions on follow-up to bolster Kabbah’s restoration. But then, on the day before his departure, the High Commissioner was told to bring with him any papers he had on Sandline; more ominously, when he arrived in the UK, he was phoned at home and told that he must not go into the office, he must have no contact with anybody in the African Department, and he would be required to give a statement under caution to HM Customs and Excise.2 It got worse: he was advised to get a lawyer (the Foreign Office were prepared to pay the cost), and he learned that if things went wrong, he could face a prison sentence of seven years.3 But why?

  Straddling the moral high ground, which he had scaled and claimed (in his public life) stood Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, pronouncing that Britain would pursue an ethical foreign policy. In so doing, he made himself hostage to his own rhetoric; his political opponents knew it, and they knew too that there was now only one direction in which he could go; and they saw a chance to topple him.

  Claims had already appeared in the press that the British company, Sandline, had breached the terms of the UN resolution 1132, banning the supply of arms to Sierra Leone during the period of the junta. These were officially denied, until Tim Spicer’s lawyer sent an open letter to the Foreign Secretary refuting allegations of sanction-breaking and claiming that officials in the Foreign Office and High Commissioner, Penfold, knew about his company’s contract with President Kabbah. And, of course, Peter Penfold did know about the contract.

  As far as I, President Kabbah, and many others were concerned, the Sandline contract did not breach UN sanctions. None of my discussion with colleagues in the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] led me to believe otherwise, and indeed the Legal Department of the UN were later to confirm that this was their understanding. However, to put a UN sanction legislation order into UK legislation, an Order in Council had to be made, and it had to be written into the UK administration procedure. And in transposing the UN sanctions order into the UK Order, mistakes were made, in my view. The legal draftsmen in the FCO tried to use an ‘off the shelf ’ sanction order, e.g. Angola – just cross out Angola and put in Sierra Leone. They then, supposedly being helpful, tried to define what was meant by ‘Sierra Leone’. They prepared a list of definitions of Sierra Leone relevant to whom the sanctions order applied. In the list, the first category was ‘the government of Sierra Leone’, believing it to be the illegal junta. Now our whole diplomatic stance had been that the government of Sierra Leone was in fact President Kabbah’s government. The AFRC junta was not even mentioned by name.4

  Indeed, the British government had got itself into a strange position. Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had personally invited the exiled President Kabbah to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in Edinburgh the previous October, an act symbolizing the recognition of Kabbah.

  The notion that the AFRC junta could have been talked into giving up power or compelled through sanctions was wrong-headed. The junta were in a very strong position, and they were b
eing supplied with arms. When ECOMOG planners came to the decision that force would be necessary to liberate Freetown, their problem was that the Task Force was vulnerable if its logistical support was cut off: the battalion at Kossoh could not be supplied by road along the peninsula, nor by sea because of the junta’s gunboat; the air corridor was all important for it. Hence Juba, as the pilot of the only helicopter keeping the air corridor open, was often consulted on matters of strategy by Gen Khobe. And at a briefing meeting Khobe told him that,

  the junta never planned to leave Freetown, and they made sure they got themselves well dug in with lots of arms and ammunition. The first arms deal was for about US $60 million, of which the $10 million was in cash and the balance in diamonds.5

  Juba thought that Khobe’s source came from Sierra Leone informers, embedded inside the junta, who managed to pass out information that was useful for ECOMOG’s planning. But, as we shall see later, ECOMOG was also receiving information from a different source. At any rate, the arms, as Juba understood it, were from the Ukraine or Belarus, and some of their citizens, according to whatever sources, came as part of the package. He certainly needed to have that information, for if the junta, as the result of an arms delivery, now had SAM-7 missiles and personnel trained to use them, Juba, who survived a missile attack on his helicopter in Angola, and amazingly walked away from the wreck,6 had to take it into the reckoning when planning his flight paths. ECOMOG strategists were right that the only way to remove the junta was by armed force. Yet, the British government expressed satisfaction with the ends, but not the means through which the junta was brought down, and ministers denied collusion with private military companies in undertaking those means.

  Then on 9 May, a picture appeared in the Times of Fred, aboard Bokkie, in a civilian shirt, his GPMG slung across his knees, the helicopter over water, a Nigerian soldier beside him. The caption underneath claimed that the civilian was a member of the South African company, Executive Outcomes.7 On the facing page, there was also a photograph of Tim Spicer. The following day, the Sunday Times, had pictures on its front page of Juba talking to two Royal Marines at the dockside in Freetown and Fred with five Royal Navy mechanics carrying out some repairs to Bokkie.8 The headline claimed these were proof of Britain’s role in the coup. The wording at times made it difficult to know whether the paper was referring to the coup that brought the junta to power or the counter-coup that brought it down. The photos were taken when HMS Cornwall was docked at Freetown in early March. Juba explains the background to them.

  By the time HMS Cornwall arrived in Freetown port, their air contingent came to meet with us in Lungi and asked if we could assist them in certain aspects, seeing that we’d been involved in the operation from the beginning, and with our vast knowledge of the country. The British took a new stance with regards to the operations and said it would be better for a soldier to talk to a soldier than to work through the political protocols. From the start we had good communication with each other, and the relation grew within a short time to where they were helping us with some maintenance on Bokkie. I also landed the Mi-24 next to the ship, and that is where the photographs were taken that featured in the international newspapers that caused major problems for the Foreign Office. Before the ship left after weeks in Freetown, I was awarded the full size Union Jack that their helicopter crew would have put down on the ground as a signal for us to come and rescue them if anything went wrong on their operation.9

  Newspaper headlines kept Robin Cook turning on the spit. His response to the whole thing showed that although he claimed to have an ethical foreign policy, he seemed not to have much of an ethical management culture for the officials who served him. The ideal type bureaucracy (of which the British Civil Service might well have been thought an example) has the superior taking responsibility for lower levels. A predecessor Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, was in post in 1982 when the Argentine military junta invaded the Falkland Islands; he took full responsibility for the shortcomings in the Foreign Office that failed to pick up the warning signs of Argentina’s intentions, and resigned. But Robin Cook took a different road, and he distanced himself from his officials, as Peter Penfold was to find out.

  I can’t understand why Robin Cook, when he heard that accusations were being made about one of his high commissioners, didn’t first of all just call me back and ask me to explain what the hell was going on. That never happened. In fact, exactly the opposite. I was not allowed to actually talk to anybody. That is baffling, and in fact, to this day, I have never been debriefed on the Sandline issue by anybody in the Foreign Office.10

  The distancing device brought in to play was a well-tried construct that has served governments in the past: an investigation whose terms of reference were closely defined by government itself into: what was know by officials and ministers about plans to supply arms to Sierra Leone. So it was not an inquiry into whether sanctions had indeed been breached, but to find out whether ministers had been informed. This sort of approach sends unpleasant shock waves through the organization, and in this case gave the message that the Foreign Secretary who, though not willing to be tainted by the shedding of blood to remove, what he himself later referred to as, ‘a brutal and savage military regime’,11 wanted heads to roll to preserve his political reputation.

  In this sort of witch-hunt, broad brush blame of work-overload is likely to surface, and a recommendation like tinkering with structures usually appears (and appeals) as a partial solution, but the essential element, from the political point of view, is that responsibility must be found to lie with one or two scapegoats – not too many, that would defeat the purpose. And when a tone like that is set at the top, it badly shakes the culture of the organization. Unaccountable things happened, it appears: letters went missing, for example; one of which was very important.

  It was a hand-written letter, posted around Christmas 1997 when Peter Penfold was at home in the UK, incorporating two elements: the first was about his meeting Tim Spicer and being told that Kabbah had gone ahead and signed the contract with Sandline; the second was a carry-over from recommendations for awards that he had submitted as a result of the outstanding service of a number of people at the time of the May 1997 AFRC coup. He had recommended MBE for his deputy Colin Glass; OBE for another member of his staff, Dai Harris; the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for Col Andrew Gale, his Defence Adviser; Military Cross for Maj Lincoln Jopp; and a Queen’s Gallantry Medal for Will Scully. This was particularly notable as it was to be the first time that an ex-SAS man ever received an award. (He also nominated Solomon Lebby, the local Sierra Leonean, who was left in charge of the Mission, for an MBE, the following year after they returned from Conakry.) His recommendations had been accepted, and the individuals informed before the release of the New Year Honours list. They were all in touch by phone, and when they learned that he had not received recognition for his part in saving lives at the time of the coup, they were all indignant: they all considered that they had worked as part of a team at the time; there was talk of their refusing theirs. So in the circumstances, Peter Penfold thought that he ought to flag it up.

  I was about to go to Canada to stay with family for Christmas with my wife. My wife had had a rough time, and she had been in tears and so on. And I persuaded the office that I should be allowed to have at least two weeks break, for up till then I’d been staying in this hotel room in Conakry. So they agreed that. But equally, this is the time when I met up with Tim Spicer, and that’s when Tim told me that the contract had been signed and they were going ahead. Now he told me this the day before I was flying out to Canada, and as I was going away for a couple of weeks, I thought I can’t leave this for two weeks, so I wrote a letter to the head of the department, telling her I’d met Tim Spicer again and that he’d confirmed that the contract had been signed. And I also put in that letter, because I’d just spoken to the guys, ‘You should be aware that Colin and Dai are a little concerned that I have not been nominated for a New Year’s
honour’. When I said concerned, they were livid, so I put it in. And fortunately, because I put that in, and I knew that it wasn’t really their department, in a way – it was honours department – I thought I’d better keep a copy of this letter. And I had one of those fax machines with a copier, so I ran it through and made a copy of this letter and posted it.

  Now, of course, this is the famous letter that never arrived in the Foreign Office. The letter that was confirming that I’d met Tim Spicer. And what was interesting was that when I next went into the Foreign Office, two people in the department started explaining to me about the honours, and why I hadn’t got an honour. Now if the letter had never arrived, why were they talking about the honour? It’s just unbelievable isn’t it?12

  This is the important letter of 30 December that, conveniently, never arrived.

  30 December 1997

  Dear Ann

  Thank you for your Christmas card. I trust you had a good Christmas.

  I have been in touch with Tim Spicer over the holiday. Kabbah has signed the deal with Blockstone for EO/Sandline to provide $10 million of equipment and training for the civil defence militia. This will begin to flow in Jan. At my suggestion they will station someone in Conakry to stay alongside Kabbah. I have asked them to keep Colin Glass fully briefed. As you know, it has always been my view that only a serious threat of force will persuade the junta to stand down, therefore I welcome this development not least because it means that Sierra Leoneans will be directly involved in getting their legitimate government back.

  I was also in touch with people in Freetown and Conakry: Christmas passed off quietly, but there was little celebration.

  I am sorry that we did not have more time to talk when I called in to the department. I told Richard Dales that I had some misgivings about our appointment of a Special S of S representative. I believe that it will undermine my position vis-à-vis Kabbah and others in Conakry and Freetown. The Americans have already appointed John Hirsch as their special representative, Francis Okelo is the UN’s special envoy, and hitherto the three of us were seen as a team representing the international community. I fear that John Flynn’s appointment will be seen as a sign of lack of confidence by HMG in me. This is further exacerbated by what will be seen as the very pointed omission of myself from amongst the other team members who have received awards in the recent military and New Year Honours List, for their efforts in Sierra Leone.