by Ross, Hamish
Fred and Juba at Paddy’s celebrate the rebels suing for peace. (Fred Marafono collection)
Chief Hinga Norman and Fred attending a pentecostal church service. (Fred Marafono collection)
Post Operation Barras, Fred positioned with GPMG as the gunship flies over the Rokel Creek towards Gberi Bana. (Fred Marafono collection)
Gberi Bana, showing the devastating fire power the British raiders deployed during the hostage release operation. (Fred Marafono collection)
Alongside the gunship, wearing DPM, from left to right, four of the British soldiers who took part in the Gberi Bana raid, then Fred. On his left, pilot Neall Ellis and on his left Deputy Minister of Defence Chief Hinga Norman. (Fred Marafono collection)
Prime Minister Tony Blair greeting Chief Hinga Norman on a visit to Sierra Leone. President Kabbah is on the right. (Fred Marafono collection)
Centre of the group, Fred, Peter Penfold, having retired from Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, and Juba. (Fred Marafono collection)
Fred, the actor Jeffrey Wright and pilot Cassie Nel. (Fred Marafono collection)
Jeffrey Wright, Daniel Craig and Fred at the premiere of Casino Royale. (Fred Marafono collection)
Left to right, Juba, Chief Hinga Norman, Peter Penfold, Hassan (Fred’s driver) and Fred. (Fred Marafono collection)
The price he paid for fighting to restore democracy – Chief Hinga Norman, shackled, indicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. (Fred Marafono collection)
Hope for future generations. Fred and Juba with children, made homeless by rebels, now given a fresh start. In the background the Lebanese school at Kenema, about 75 metres behind which Juba landed Bokkie when they resupplied ECOMOG in October 1997. (Fred Marafono collection)
Chapter Nine
Operation Barras
Most of ‘L’ Detachment’s work is night work and all of it demands courage, fitness and determination of the highest degree and also, and just as important, discipline, skill and intelligence and training.
David Stirling in, Birth, Growth and Maturity of 1st SAS Regiment
(The Paddy Mayne Diary).
The template that David Stirling had in mind when he selected men for the unit he founded in the North African desert in 1941 would perhaps be just as appropriate for its future generations. Certainly, over the years, those same qualities and characteristics have been evident in its members. A worthy example – although he does not see it this way – is Fred Marafono, only three months short of his seventh decade, in action, supporting his old unit in one of its most successful lightning raids since the Second World War when, under the command of Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, at Capo Murro di Porco in Sicily, it captured three enemy gun batteries in rapid succession and destroyed a fourth with the loss of only one man. Its commanding general at the time said of that raid, ‘That was a brilliant operation, brilliantly planned and brilliantly carried out.’1 The same evaluation could equally well apply to Operation Barras in Sierra Leone in 2000.
However, there are significant differences between then and now. During the later stages of the Second World War, Paddy Mayne was making representation because the unit received no publicity; the public at large was unaware of its existence; he felt its achievements should be known.2 Sixty years later the position is reversed: some newspaper headlines are written on the assumption that the public has an insatiable appetite for information about the SAS; yet the nature of present day conflicts and counter-insurgency means that the MoD insists that little is given away about the operational details of special units.
That is a reality (and one he subscribes to) within which the account of what Fred would call his very minor role in Operation Barras has to be placed.
The months leading up to the brilliant rescue operation of British army hostages were marked by drama, farce, in-fighting in UNAMSIL and more needless loss of life. Fred took the leading role in a brief dramatic happening with political implications, that took place, not in his favourite haunt, Paddy’s, but in the bar of the Cape Sierra hotel. Air Wing personnel had not been paid for months; they were still awaiting payment of their money as promised by the President. It is not hard to see why they were aggrieved: they had committed their own resources to maintain Bokkie after they took it over and they needed the money. During the time they were being paid by ECOMOG there was no problem about their receiving their due in US dollars. That only came about when Nigeria passed the responsibility for paying the Air Wing to where it rightly belonged, the Sierra Leone government.
The home-made problem came about because everyone who had a hand in signing our payment papers wanted a slice of our money for themselves before they would process it to the next department. The Chief saw the President a few times to tell these people involved to desist and sign these request forms because we risked our lives and still did so and we deserved every penny we earned. But even Kabbah’s instructions were disregarded. We were helped at one time by an expatriate man recruited by Dr. Jonah to resolve the Sierra Leone Finance Department. But once he left, we went back to the ‘delay’ and phoney excuses until we agreed to their terms. That was life in a ‘brown envelope’ country. It was so bad that even the British High Commissioner was involved by directly asking Kabbah to help in releasing our pay.
Juba might put it in the category of WAWA [West Africa Wins Again].
WAWA has so many facets to it. One simple example is a West African busy drowning, with only his arm sticking out above the water, and you come to rescue him. You’re about to grab his arm, when he pulls it back and says, ‘What’s in for me?’3
At a wider level, when Fred and Juba considered what they were risking their lives for, in moments of gloom it all seemed futile: the government’s progress towards disarming the rebels was getting nowhere; unbelievably, the RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, who was said to have already amassed millions of dollars for himself from the sale of illegally mined diamonds, was now chairman of the Commission for the Management of Strategic Resources, National Reconstruction and Development, and it was widely known that illegal diamond mining was still going on in rebel-held territory.
What was missing was leadership and insight at the top. President Kabbah lacked both. It was frustrating for High Commissioner Peter Penfold to see the shortcomings and guess what the consequences might be.
He had no way of being able to deal with a person like Sankoh. I mean the way that he treated Sankoh, I mean, it made your stomach turn. He was flattering to him, and he kept on kidding us all; he would invite Sankoh round to the residence late at night, just the two of them would chat, and then I’d go and see Kabbah the next morning, and he’d say, ‘Sankoh’s really changing; he’s changing, he’s really trusting me now. He’s really going to follow through with the disarmament.’ He was so gullible when it came to things like that. Maybe it was because he sincerely wanted it to happen. But he did not have the political nous, he did not have the experience of security matters; he did not have the ability to make decisions.4
And stoking the incredulity of one that served with the 200 men of Executive Outcomes who defeated the RUF on the battlefield, news that the United Nations, custodian of international peace and security, was finding it necessary to increase the UNAMSIL force from 6,000 to 11,000 men was the last straw.
Fred’s rare outburst came on Saturday 5 February. He already had a good few drinks under his belt in Paddy’s before moving on to the bar at the Cape Sierra. There, with Juba, some British members of UNAMSIL, a few ECOMOG personnel and in the company of some of Kabbah’s people, he took the floor. Usually a man of serene stillness that masks great physical strength, he silenced the august gathering by declaring that they had risked their lives to save this government, and delivered himself of the considered view, ‘The President is nothing but a fucking weak shit, and Gen Khobe is a fucking thief.’ Immediately, there was a move by Kabbah’s people to call the police and have him arrested, but the ECOMOG Chief Air Officer, Gp Capt Easterbrook, stepped in and quietened things by sayin
g it was an Air Wing matter; they would deal with it. Next day in his diary Fred dolefully recorded the events of the night before and noted that he must apologize to Rod Stewart, the RAF officer attached to Air Wing.
However, the one who could have taken offence was not Rod Stewart but the President; and not surprisingly his minions dutifully told him about this drunken outburst on the part of a friend of Hinga Norman’s, because some time later the President challenged Hinga Norman about it.
The Chief told me that Kabbah mentioned the incident to him at one of their meetings one morning. He played it down by saying that Fred was a military man and talks straight as they do in the military. We both laughed, and I promised never to embarrass the Chief again.
But before that though, Fred had to face the music at work on Monday morning. The political drama of Saturday night was discussed; Fred simply recorded in his diary, ‘Not very pleasant.’ He was to keep a low profile for a while, so he decided to take a spell of long overdue leave in the UK; and the following Thursday he met Chief Hinga Norman and told him his plans, and flew home the next day for a long break. He had not been home all that long before Juba phoned him and reminded him of the absurdity of the situation now when he said that Neall Ellis and Cassie had flown the President and ‘Killer Sankoh’ to Bo and Kenema.
Then, in Sierra Leone, Brig Gen Khobe, the Nigerian who had been appointed as Chief of the Defence Staff, became ill. It seemed to Peter Penfold that the security situation was deteriorating; there would be a vacuum as ECOMOG withdrew from the country and the UN were slow to deploy; and his tour of duty as British High Commissioner was coming to an end. He contacted the Foreign Office and made a number of suggestions: he should stay on a little longer to help ease tensions; Col Dent should temporarily move into the Sierra Leone Ministry of Defence; Britain should bring forward the arrival of a brigadier who would head the UK military training team; and finally, they should ask Brig David Richards, who was visiting the country at the time, to stay on for a week or two and give military advice to President Kabbah – both Brig Richards and the President were in agreement with this idea. ‘The FCO turned down all my suggestions.’5
To make matters worse, Gen Khobe was airlifted to Nigeria in a coma. He was treated in hospital there and, it was reported, died on 18 April as a result of complications that had set in to an old shrapnel wound. Khobe, it will be recalled, had been slightly wounded at the storming of State House in Freetown when ECOMOG ousted the AFRC junta two years earlier; and at the time Juba and Fred had flown him to Lungi so that he could be airlifted for treatment in Nigeria. But that had been two years ago, and now, in Sierra Leone, rumours were rife of an alternative cause of death: it was said that he had been poisoned over a period of time. As a foreigner in charge of the military of the country, he may well have had enemies – among Nigerians as well as Sierra Leoneans (there was bad feeling among some senior Nigerian army officers that Khobe’s perceived new status was above theirs). But whatever the cause of death, Fred’s response to the announcement was unambiguous,
I was in London when I heard the news that Khobe was dead. I went and bought a few bottles of red wine and celebrated his death as a rat! Much blood of innocent Sierra Leoneans was shed because of his greed and selfishness.
Who knows, Fred’s intemperate assessment at the Cape Sierra bar may indeed have been a case of ‘in vino veritas’, for about the time of Khobe’s death, Maj Gen Jetley, the Indian commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone, was crafting an early draft of an explosive memorandum to the UN – that would not become public knowledge for some months until it was printed in the Guardian, but was circulated among Security Council members – accusing senior Nigerian army officers of prolonging the war in Sierra Leone, being secretly in cahoots with the rebels and amassing a fortune for themselves through the sale of illegally mined diamonds in the rebel-held areas. In his memorandum, Jetley singled out the late Brig Gen Khobe for being known as the ‘Ten Million Man’, on account of Khobe’s allegedly having made $10 million from the sale of diamonds.6
However, Khobe’s death prompted a crisis for President Kabbah. It looks as though, in desperation now, he asked Britain to provide a senior army officer to be Chief of the Defence Staff. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office Secretary of State for Africa, Peter Hain, told his parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee that while Britain would supply arms and ammunition for the pro-government forces fighting the rebels he was turning down the request to provide a Chief of Defence Staff. Using uncharacteristically blunt language for a politician referring to the head of state of a friendly country, he ‘called Kabbah’s proposal a “crazy idea” which would have put a British officer in charge of an army “which did not in effect exist”’.7 In addition, Britain also decided to send a small team of military advisers.
In Sierra Leone, the peacekeeping process turned into a fiasco: about three days after Peter Penfold departed the country, the RUF attacked Magburaka, Makeni and Kenema. They surrounded a disarmament camp in Magburaka and forced the UN peacekeepers to dismantle it; on 5 May rebels seized 13 of the 16 armoured cars of the Zambian contingent of UNAMSIL; the following day an RUF force of between five hundred to a thousand captured Lunsar, using vehicles captured from the UN; and by this time an estimate of the number of UN troops captured by the rebels was as high as 500. But there was further horror in the streets of Freetown: on 8 May, thousands of peace demonstrators massed and converged on the house of Foday Sankoh protesting at the slow progress of the peace process. Sankoh’s bodyguards opened fire on them killing and wounding more than twenty people, while Sankoh escaped from the building.
Hearing about the events in Sierra Leone on BBC news, Fred phoned Chief Norman from London in the evening. The Chief judged that the situation was now calm but tense; and Fred said that he would return there right away. Although on leave, Fred had been engaged in discussions about possible future training projects in Sierra Leone, and he phoned a contact to find out if he could get a flight out with the RAF. He got the answer the next day – it was ‘no joy.’ He then phoned Hinga Norman again and asked him to organize a landing visa for him. The following day he received it by fax, and booked his flight.
The security situation continued to deteriorate in Sierra Leone: a contingent of UNAMSIL troops was forced to withdraw from the strategic crossroads town of Masiaka after coming under fire from unidentified gunmen.8 In the light of the UNAMSIL’s loss of control, Sam Hinga Norman, Deputy Minister of Defence announced, ‘Our security in Sierra Leone was in the hands of the United nations but surprisingly we have come to the conclusion that the United Nations has not been able to protect us any longer.’9 He indicated that Kamajor militia and loyal Sierra Leonean troops had been sent to Masiaka to halt the RUF advance. Britain, in the meantime, ordered an evacuation of its nationals, and Operation Palliser was set in train with the arrival of the advance party of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, whose role was to secure Lungi airport to which the bulk of the regiment would be flown directly. Royal Naval warships converged on West Africa.
Within days of sizing up the situation on the ground, the commander of the British forces (who, interestingly enough, turned out to be), Brig David Richards, realized that UNAMSIL could not contain the rebels by playing the role of the village bobby, whose presence alone, it is supposed, reassures the law abiding and deters the potential law breaker; speaking on Radio Democracy 98.1 FM, he urged the UN force to become more belligerent, and alongside pro-government forces ‘take the battle forward.’10
The underlying folly of the agreement that had given the RUF what it was unable to attain on the battlefield was spelled out forthrightly by the chairman of the US senate’s powerful Appropriations sub-committee, who blocked the US contribution to pay for one third of the UN peacekeeping costs. He argued that the Lomé Peace Accord was an abnegation of responsibility on the part of the west in forcing the Sierra Leoneans to accept it, then leaving them to their fate.11
Although Foday Sankoh was captured later in May, it made no real difference as far as the RUF in the bush were concerned, for it had been without his leadership for some time; and as far as the results of the cynical expediency in railroading through the Lomé Accord were concerned, the damage was already done.
On 14 May, Fred was back in the country; he met Hinga Norman the same day; and he was in action with the Air Wing two days later. Juba was long overdue leave, and was in South Africa. Fred’s first reconnaissance and fighting patrols were to the Makeni and Lunsar areas. A pattern was established where they flew every day or every second day. On 20 May, after a reconnaissance flight to the Mange bridge, they picked up Chief Norman after his return from a short trip to Nigeria; then next day, not far from the Madina Junction, Fred attacked a transport vehicle that burst into flames when tracer rounds hit it. Although they were resupplying troops, the Air Wing gunship team were certainly taking ‘the battle forward’ in a way UNAMSIL was not. And so, on 22 May,
On our way back from Bumbuna resupply, we came out to follow the road just before Binkolo, looking for any stolen UN vehicles used by RUF commanders, heading towards Makeni and Lunsar, rebels strongholds. Nothing at Binkolo nor Makeni town, even the market square was quiet. And passing Makeni following the road, we saw a white pickup caught in a cutting on the road. I asked Neall to orbit, which he did, giving me direct view to the target, which I blasted with my GPMG. That operation left 3 bodies on the ground. One guy escaped from the initial burst of the gun and tried to climb up the steep embankment but I brought him down without any regret whatsoever. Years of experiencing the cruelty and senselessness of their atrocities to the unarmed civilians made me immune to any feelings. In actual fact, I enjoyed it very much.