by Al Venter
I recall some of those take-offs from the football field inside the military camp where we would land. Juba was a brilliant pilot who had spent a lot of his professional career flying chopper gunships in Angola and elsewhere. Self-taught, he’d learned to fly the Mi-17 very well indeed. He ended up teaching me a trick or two, which I applied to my work in other contract areas when we were overweight on take-off or there weren’t any decent runways or areas for take-off.
He demonstrated a technique for taking off from a field the size of a football pitch that could be surrounded by high-tension wires, 20 metres high. He’d go into the hover using ground cushion and then slowly reverse back to the furthest point downwind of the field, where he’d initiate a positive move forward. He’d go on doing that to the point where we lost the ground cushion effect and translational lift and that would effectively allow the Hip to descend. At the same time, he’d pull maximum collective and would allow downward movement to the ground to continue. Together with forward speed, he would compress the oleos, which would cause the helicopter to bounce back into the air and, at the same time, pass through transition. The helicopter would accelerate while climbing out of the LZ and clear the wires.
It was all very hairy the first couple of times, because once committed nothing would prevent the chopper from striking any of the obstacles if all that didn’t succeed. However, once mastered, the technique was sometimes the only way to clear confined areas safely, albeit with a small margin, without sacrificing load. We never considered the possibility of an engine cut during the take-off—after all, we were supposed to be immortal.
As Nellis recalled, Juba would never head directly to Freetown as that would have meant flying over the jungle. Apparently, he was paranoid about being shot down by a SAM missile because, in the Cafunfo raid in Eastern Angola, his Mi-17, with John Viera as co-pilot, had actually taken a strike by a SAM-7 fired by rebel troops. The hit should have destroyed the machine but it didn’t. Consequently, he was able to auto-rotate and land without too much damage to the helicopter.2‘At least they were able to walk out of the downed machine alive’, Nellis commented with a nod of his head.
Clearly, Juba’s fear of being blown away by SAMs was well founded, but it did make for much longer journeys between Monrovia and Freetown because, as Nellis remembers, sometimes they would head out as much as 50km to sea before heading back towards Sierra Leone again.
Neall Ellis prepares for take-off at Cockerill Barracks. He often flew two sorties a day single-handed, sometimes three. During his Sierra Leone war he rarely had the support of a regular co-pilot. Author’s photo)
When I asked him why he went so far out into the ocean, he would say something about enemy gunboats, which might have SAMs on board. Of course, everybody on the chopper worried about what would happen if we had to ditch in the ocean. The water was often brilliantly clear, and we sometimes saw really big sharks. Then you’d find a lone fisherman perhaps 60 clicks out to sea in his little wooden dugout canoe and you’d think he was crazy.
Heading out of Monrovia, the Mi-17 would sometimes go into a remote area to supply Kamajor fighting units at Base Zero, in the wetlands southeast of the small town of Matru. Nellis recalls:
It was completely isolated in some pretty heavy swampland, the kind of terrain that made it difficult for the rebels to attack with vehicles. We were always very impressed by the level of organisation of these otherwise primitive bush people but, of course, they were headed by Chief Hinga Norman, the only minister in the government who stayed on in Sierra Leone to fight Foday Sankoh’s RUF after the coup d’état. By the time Hinga was done, he’d organised the Kamajors into a very professional strike force that was able to do a lot of damage. We would watch them doing their thing and you couldn’t miss the fact that, unlike the Sierra Leonean Army, they were quite well disciplined and very good at their job.
At the time, Colonel Kholbe thought that the Kamajors were a group of upstarts and hardly worth regarding as an asset in his anti-rebel push; not that there was very much ‘pushing’ being done by the Nigerians in any event. He doubted whether they would match up to Hinga Norman’s claims.
Norman arranged for us to fly Kholbe and some of his senior command, along with the Sandline management including Bert Sachse, to witness a live-fire demonstration at one of the camps in the interior. There followed a useful demonstration of fire and movement, and the initiation of each of the men by a shaman or witchdoctor where the Kamajor combatants were ‘anointed’ by one of their high priests to make them ‘immune from bullets’. Norman then urged Kholbe to produce one of his best marksmen to actually shoot one of his soldiers.
‘Shoot my man’, Norman urged, but Kholbe refused, so Norman said to the Nigerian, ‘then let us bring a chicken and shoot that’. Again Kholbe refused. The incident ended up badly souring relations between Kholbe and the Kamajor movement and there was really no reason for it. In the end, we thought it was something to do with ju ju or black magic, because there was certainly distrust on Kholbe’s part.
Hostilities against the rebels in Sierra Leone continued to intensify and Sandline ended up spending a couple of million dollars on weapons and equipment for the Kamajors. In Spicer’s view, it was money well spent as the Kamajors were committed, ruthless and totally opposed to the barbarians who had murdered scores of their people. Much smaller than the ECOMOG force, they were actually causing a lot more damage to the enemy than the entire Nigerian Army, which was immense by comparison.
After the weapons had been delivered by air to Lungi, Kholbe stepped in and confiscated the lot. The Sandline administration was accused of breaking sanctions. In the end, the Nigerian dribbled small quantities of equipment to the Kamajors.
From a shipment that filled an aircraft with military hardware, which was to be used to fight the rebels, the Kamajors ended up with five PKMs and a couple of dozen AK-47s (each with one magazine and five rounds of ammunition), which was not only absurd, but an insult to the prowess of an outstanding fighting unit. Also passed on by Kholbe were rimless GPMG cartridges for the PKMs. Kholbe’s actions were viewed as a deliberate attempt to sabotage the Kamajor movement.
As Nellis recalled, after he and his compadres realised that Kholbe was not interested in helping the Kamajors fight the common enemy, they would steal Kalashnikovs and ammunition from the Nigerians and hand them to the bush fighters.
Also, when we flew the bodies of the ECOMOG soldiers who had been killed in action back to Freetown, we’d carefully secrete their weapons in some of the nooks and crannies on board and hand them over to Hinga Norman’s people the next time we made contact with them … we’d sometimes use our own money to buy rifles and ammo for them.
Whatever his faults, Colonel Kholbe had been a good professional soldier who, in most other respects, knew where his responsibilities lay. He certainly looked after the Sandline staff, the air crews in particular. During the ECOMOG intervention, he was seriously wounded in a firefight in the jungle, having taken a shard of shrapnel in his side, and it was Juba who evacuated him in extremely bad weather to Lungi for treatment. Had that not happened, Kholbe would almost certainly have died of septicaemia.
Thereafter, he arranged to have Sandline’s aircrew stay at the Cape Sierra Hotel for the next two years. Although ECOMOG was supposed to have picked up the tab, says Nellis, ‘I don’t believe anybody paid our bills in the end’.
Meanwhile, the country had no effective ruler because the Kabbah government had been brought down in 1997 by a combination of factors including the destabilisation of its army, the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Force (RSLAF). The collapse was almost certainly aided by strongmen elements within the bloated bureaucracy that was put in place after EO had been forced out. Thereafter, working with the Nigerians in a series of private deals, Sandline played an invaluable role in bringing President Kabbah back into power in February 1998.
Ironically, even though it was a mercenary-based group, Colonel Spicer’s organisation was a lot m
ore transparent in its affairs than the then government of Nigeria, with the latter being responsible for numerous human rights abuses and criminal activities. Indeed, the lack of any real authority in Sierra Leone prompted Nigeria to regard the country as a base from which to expand its interests into other parts of West Africa, and this was a matter of concern to both Whitehall and Washington
Consequently, when President Kabbah returned to Sierra Leone from Conakry in April 1998, there was a welcoming parade through the streets of Freetown. The people were not only pleased to have him back in power, but it was hoped that he would blunt Nigeria’s quasi-colonial aspirations. Interestingly, the Nigerian head of state, Sani Abacha, seized the opportunity and ensured that he was also on hand at the welcoming ceremony, which turned into a momentous occasion.
The other notable event that took place that day happened when President Abacha stepped out of his presidential jet moments before joining Sierra Leone’s President Kabbah on the dais. Very publicly, the Nigerian leader called for the South African pilot Juba Joubert to step forward. He thanked him for what he had done for Sierra Leone and for ECOMOG. It obviously had to do with Juba’s saving the life of Colonel Kholbe. After thanking Juba, he continued to the dais and joined Kabbah to address the crowd. Nellis remembers the day well:
The welcoming crowd, who saw all this, went wild with adulation for this ‘whitey’ hero of the day, after which it was left to us to fly the presidential entourage to the football stadium in the heart of the capital in our dilapidated old ‘Bokkie’.
I’ll never forget President Kabbah’s wife, Patricia, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer not long before. She was obviously very sick and in a lot of pain. However, she summoned the strength to get up from her seat and wave to crowds as though there was nothing wrong with her. After the parade we took her back to State House and almost had to carry her to the chopper. She collapsed on board and died only months later. She was a great lady!
Meanwhile, things in Freetown were falling apart. There was no piped water and no electricity in the city, yet whenever Nellis and his group went to talk to members of the ECOMOG Junta at their residences, they couldn’t miss their opulent furnishings, expensive cars and Land Rovers, all which had been ‘confiscated’ in the interests of the ongoing struggle. Nellis said:
All that stuff was later shipped to Nigeria, at government expense, of course, which was one of the reasons why the Nigerians soon got a deserved reputation of being extremely efficient looters. They were exceptional at what was termed ‘the distribution of wealth’.
Things weren’t going too well with the company either. John Farr, an ex-SAS major who was working for Sandline, approached Nellis and his team mid-August and said that they were pulling out. That was when the team was made an offer they couldn’t refuse. The company could either pay them all their salaries and bonuses owing, plus their air tickets home, or they could have the helicopter ‘Bokkie’ in lieu, as a measure of recompense.
There was no argument, recalled Nellis. There were no salaries for that final month but we accepted our beloved ‘Bokkie’ for severance, which, together with the radios, tooling and other equipment left behind by Sandline, set Juba, Fred Marafono and me up in business doing freelance chopper work. We eventually netted about $1 million in the process, many times more than we would have been paid had we accepted the initial offer.
Because of Juba’s friendship with Kholbe, he was able to negotiate a contract with the Nigerians to use ‘Bokkie’ for the resupply of their troops even though it was Sierra Leonean Government cash involved. Nellis recalls:
It was of no concern to us where the money came from as long as we were paid at the end of each month, even though any payment would be minus the inevitable backhander. Said backhander was roughly 10 per cent of all our earnings, which went to Kholbe and his senior officers. From then on we started flying quite a bit because everybody was scoring.
We were in a bar on the beach one evening when I heard this loud French accent talking. I turned to Juba and said something about that sounding just like our old pal JJ Fuentes from Zaire, and indeed it was. We never really thought we’d see him again but there he stood, spouting the same old brash bullshit. This time he was with another young Frenchman, Matthieu Chaissang, who soon became one of our most valued operators until he left Sierra Leone in January 1999 when the rebels overran Freetown.
Both men were in Freetown ‘looking for opportunities’, they told us and they couldn’t have arrived at a better time. We were looking for somebody who could fly our fixed-wing Partanavia, which we used for transporting various generals and for reconnaissance purposes. Juba spoke to Kholbe and Hinga Norman and gave them the background, and it was agreed that we could take them on. We now had two French nationals on our team.
It was during this period that the notorious incident involving ‘Bokkie’ and the Royal Navy Type 23 frigate HMS Norfolk occurred.
The warship had recently berthed in Freetown after rescuing dozens of refugees at sea. One of the windows in ‘Bokkie’s’ cockpit had been smashed in a bird strike and Nellis asked one of the ship’s officers to give the crew a hand. No problem, he was told, and the helicopter was flown to the harbour and landed alongside the frigate, while RN engineers on board fixed the damage. They had no Perspex or Mi-8 windows to replace the broken one, as Nellis recalls, so this intrepid bunch of sailors pop-riveted a sheet plate of aluminium to the frame as a substitute.
Meanwhile, we’d been invited on board by the RN flight crew; we even had a small party on the frigate. What we didn’t know was that somebody on the ship had taken a photo of ‘Bokkie’ parked alongside the frigate and leaked news to the Sunday Times. The story carried by that newspaper was that the Royal Navy was assisting a bunch of mercenaries and it didn’t have to state that they were a cut-throat bunch of bastards; that much was inferred.
It was a cruel, unthinking piece of journalism and in its wake, after Sandline had been pushed out of the country due to pressure from Westminster, hundreds of thousands more people were killed in the hostilities that followed. Those responsible for the disclosure, which involved quite an innocuous event, have a lot of innocent blood on their hands!
After the proverbial shit hit the fan and questions were asked of the Ministry of Defence, the captain of HMS Norfolk was relieved of his command.
There is no doubt that British Intelligence was more than casually interested in what Sandline was doing in Sierra Leone. Colonel Bert Sachse told a visiting American journalist that everybody knew that diamonds from the country’s rich alluvial deposits around Kono were being used by terrorist groups around the world to fund their operations against the West. These groups included radical Muslim groups, such as Hizbollah in Lebanon, as well as the RUF.
‘This is a totally different ballgame,’ Sachse declared. ‘In this game, one doesn’t ask a lot of questions. But I can tell you that as an ex-colony, the UK felt something of a responsibility to take an interest in where the diamonds went, the merchants who were marketing them, terrorist involve ment and, as a consequence, the need to stop that flow. We went into Sierra Leone in our own interests. I think we could have handled the whole thing ourselves’, Sachse declared.
He went on: ‘As I said, we are not mercenaries but think of ourselves more as “privateers,” and we went in where no government was prepared to go. I know the Yanks don’t like losing guys for nothing. The Brits made it easier by turning a blind eye, seeing how far things would go.’
Asked why the Sandline operation wasn’t stopped sooner, Colonel Sachse was candid: ‘One must assume there is a link between Sandline and British Intelligence’, were his words.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TAKING THE WAR TO THE REBELS IN SIERRA LEONE
Washington was clearly disturbed by the downturn of events in Sierra Leone and it wasn’t long before there were some new faces—most of them American—at Cockerill Barracks. The first to arrive was a Californian company, the Pacific
Architects and Engineers (PAE), who were instructed by the U.S. State Department to help the ECOMOG war effort. For its air operations in Sierra Leone, PAE hired another American company, International Charter Incorporated (ICI) of Oregon, which had a rather distinct U.S. Government footprint. This raised quite a few eyebrows.
ICI’s helicopters were Russian and were painted white and blue all over, with large American flags prominently displayed on both sides of the fuselage. Flown by Russian pilots and protected by ‘retired’ U.S. Special Forces personnel, these helicopters provided the beans and bullets for ECOMOG forces fighting the war. Like Nellis’ ‘Bokkie’ they would also remove the wounded and dead, bring in fuel supplies and ferry the occasional VIP about the country, usually some American congressmen trying to score points with his electorate.
ICI’s presence in the country was a useful adjunct to what Nellis and his team were trying to achieve, and also a fairly effective distraction from direct British involvement in the war. In fact, very few people were aware that the command-and-control centre at Cockerill Barracks was run by senior British officers and included SAS personnel who, strictly against the orders of the Minister of Defence in London, Nellis would take on reconnaissance or fact finding missions.
Support personnel on board the ICI choppers were a mixed bunch. By all accounts, they were comfortable mixing it with the rebels, and more often than not took the initiative when they ‘encountered’ Foday Sankoh’s people along the way.
Among the more prominent was Mykel Hawke, a Special Forces reserve operative who, when not with his unit in Iraq or Afghanistan, did this sort of thing for fun. He saved Nellis’ bacon on more than one occasion. Hawke sometimes provided the Air Wing, as Nellis and his team were known, with logistical support in the field, including fuel drops in remote places so that ‘Bokkie’ could get home. Interestingly, he has since gone on to make a name for himself by hosting several television series on The Discovery Channel.