by Al Venter
As far as Nellis was concerned, it was a great day for war. The visibility was perfect, as it was one of those bright, sunny West African days where a target can be seen for miles. Unfortunately, the clear weather cut both ways and the rebels would be able to spot his chopper from a long distance away. The Air Wing delayed their take-off by a little because time means nothing in Africa. Pitching up for an appointment an hour late is normal, Nellis explained.
Once over Lunsar, Nellis saw nothing. There were no vehicles in the area and no groups of people either in the town or in the surrounding area. It didn’t make sense. What was immediately clear was that the RUF delegation was late. So, taking the second option, the Mi-24 went down the road, clipping along at less than 15 metres above the ground. The intention was to stay low because if there were any rebels ahead, Nellis wanted to surprise them. He knew, too, that the rebel vehicles would have anti-aircraft guns mounted on them.
Nellis liked the odds. As he says, he was pretty certain he would have the advantage of surprise because the last thing the rebels would have been expecting was a gunship hitting them from the air. After all, they were meeting the second most powerful military man in the country, so the rebel command must have been confident that he would ensure that nothing untoward would be allowed to happen. In their minds, it was probably a given that he would ensure their safe passage. The meeting was believed to have been the UN’s idea and that must have been a guarantee of sorts, believed Nellis.
Two Royal Air Force Chinook helicopters parked together with a Royal Navy Lynx (in the rear) at Lungi International Airport outside Freetown. Author’s photo
Shortly after passing over the village of Macut, about 15 clicks from the town of Makeni, the gunship breasted a low hill. At that point Nellis spotted a four-vehicle convoy heading his way. In the lead was a Toyota land cruiser escorted by a pair of motorcycles. A pick-up with a DShK heavy machine gun mounted on the back followed a couple of hundred metres behind the three lead vehicles with a five- or six-man gun crew crowded around it.
Nellis’ immediate instinct was to go straight in. With the first motorcycle in his sights, he delivered a burst from his Gatling. The target disintegrated and hurled what was left of the driver and the bike into the bush, in a heap. The second bike wobbled perilously for a moment and then ran headlong into a ditch. Nellis locked the land cruiser in his sights and shattered its windscreen. A split-second later its fuel tank exploded.
The driver of the rear pick-up jumped on his brakes, but Nellis was able to get in a short burst, most of which went wide. By then the attack had lasted only seconds. Throwing the Hind hard to port, Nellis banked and came in again. Hassan shouted through the mike that the rebels were bombshelling from the last three vehicles which, as Nellis anticipated, probably carried the main delegation. As he recalled later, cover in the foliage was the only option left to them. With another whoop from Hassan, the two side gunners joined in. Both he and Lieutenant Schenks set about picking off targets with their GPMGs.
The next time Nellis brought the helicopter around, he decided to bring his rockets into play. A couple of rebels who were still with the pickup were trying to swing the gun around, but they were struggling with a jam. A salvo of 16 rockets went into the pick-up, eight from each pod.
‘Thus were a few more gooks sacrificed for the cause’, was how Nellis later put it. Another low altitude turn and more rockets raked thickets where Hassan had spotted some of the rebels taking cover. After that strike, as he explained to his bosses at Cockerill Barracks that evening, there was no more resistance. The gunship was able to concentrate on eliminating the remaining vehicles as well as the individual members of the delegation still trying to escape.
Because the bush in that immediate area wasn’t as thick as elsewhere, Hassan spotted some of them trying to crawl along a gulley. He asked Nellis to bank to starboard and then set about doing the necessary. Nellis explained that he knew they would never be able to account for every single member of the party, but it was not for want of trying. Anyway, as he declared afterwards, he had had a stoppage on the Gatling and that ended the exercise. Also, they were out of rockets, so he decided to call it a day.
The flow of radio intercepts at Cockerill didn’t stop. They poured in from all over Sierra Leone—Makeni, Kono, everywhere. Some originated from Liberia, inquiring about the whereabouts of a General Sesay, the senior RUF officer in the delegation. The rebel command was definitely rattled.
Still more intercepts the following day confirmed that Nellis had knocked out the convoy’s communications on his first pass, removing the radio operator’s hand in the process. As a result, nobody at either Lunsar or Makeni had any idea of what had taken place, or even that there had been an attack. Only after dark, and then tentatively for fear of a night strike, did another convoy set off from Makeni. Their orders were to find out what had happened to the RUF interim leader.
With Foday Sankoh in jail by this time, Sesay had only recently been appointed head of the rebel junta. He’d been lucky because he had only been slightly hurt in the attack. Ten other senior rebel commanders had been killed outright, including several regional heads. Early reports suggested that Brigadier General Maurice Kallon, head of the northern axis of the RUF war effort, was dead, but this later proved false.
Another battlefield commander, Dennis Mingo, alias ‘Superman’, was wounded in the attack. In fact, just about everybody in the convoy took some kind of hit, with several badly hurt.
Much more damaging, especially to future United Nations/RUF relations, was that Garba and his entourage never showed up at Lunsar. Had the Nigerian commander at least made the attempt to do so, he might have had a case to argue. Even worse, nobody told the rebels that at very short notice that the meeting had been cancelled. Garba and several others with him could have easily used their satellite phones to call it off, but they did not. Consequently, the rebels had good reason to believe they had been betrayed and, of course, they had been. In their own words: ‘The Nigerian betrayed us!’
Executive Outcomes made good use of former Soviet Mi-17s in their Angolan and Sierra Leone campaigns: as did Neall Ellis, in various theatres of military activity, including the Balkans. Author’s photo
The consensus at Cockerill Barracks was that Garba had probably been intimidated by Chief Hinga’s questions to his boss. Nellis surmised that Jetley had spoken to his Nigerian deputy about the call and that Garba had probably sensed that a catastrophe was about to erupt.
Once the strike was announced, Garba resorted to invective. He immediately launched a campaign of words against several British officers seconded to the Sierra Leonean Army, accusing them of bugging his satellite phone and intercepting his messages. He followed that up with a bitter attack on Whitehall and Britain in general claiming that the African cause had been betrayed. ‘They tried to undermine my command!’ he told his deputy, spitting out the words in an already familiar display of fury.
Several choice comments were reserved for Colonel Mike Dent, the CDS’s opposite number with the British military advisory contingent. Sitting across the table from him at the next staff meeting, Garba traded more insults. Undeterred, Dent apparently told the man to go fuck himself.
In fact, Garba’s troubles had only just begun. The rebels condemned him in the strongest language in their propaganda broadcasts. He was playing a double game, was the inference. They cried that they had been led into a trap and that he would ‘pay for the murders’.
At Cockerill the mood was upbeat, even though nobody was fully aware of the details about how the rebel itinerary and dates had been leaked, or why the gunship was on the Makeni road at just right moment. Gradually, aspects of the ambush filtered into town and the event was portrayed as significant, with one daily calling it ‘A great victory for President Kabbah.’
Looking back, Nellis is not certain his mission on the Makeni road was as successful as some made it out to be. The strike had indeed boosted the sagging morale of both t
he government and the army. The newspapers could not get enough of the story, though without the behind-the-scenes details. As more details emerged about the UN’s—and, in particular, Garba’s—duplicity, a visible rift appeared between the Nigerian and Indian factions in West Africa.
Ultimately, this divide led to New Delhi pulling its troops out of the UN force altogether, followed shortly afterward by UN Supremo Kofi Annan’s declaration that the Jordanian contingent would leave as well. The moves depleted the UN ‘peacekeeping’ strength in Sierra Leone by about a quarter, and obliged Britain to take on a more obtrusive security role. Also, the Nigerian Army in Sierra Leone was forced to temper its dealings with the RUF. Had they been allowed to continue, Kabbah’s government would have been pushed further into isolation.
There were several results that troubled Nellis. Both Jetley and Garba were aware that they had been duped. After the attack, both men refused to provide the Air Wing with help. Until the strike, the Hinds had been able to refuel at UN depots, both at Lungi and Hastings Airports. Jetley saw to it that those facilities were put off-limits to the Air Wing. Ammunition was also not forthcoming, which led to some serious shortages a month or so later. Whitehall had to schedule several emergency arms deliveries by air and these were questioned in Westminster.
In the past, a grudging pact had existed between the Air Wing and the UN forces, but relations hadn’t been good since the first phase of the UN operation. There had been several fractious encounters in past months, and a deep suspicion between the two parties developed as a consequence. Jetley, who usually played the role of the panderer, treated Nellis and his crowd as adversaries. The consequence of Jetley’s actions became more apparent about a fortnight after the Makeni raid. Nellis’ Mi-24 was ordered to attack a rebel target and he was accompanied by Colonel Carew to Garba’s office with requests for ammunition and spare parts in order to complete the mission. The moment the two men stepped inside the door the Nigerian became belligerent.
‘He refused us anything we’d asked for, saying that he wasn’t prepared to give us any assistance whatsoever’, recalled Nellis. He also accused the Air Wing of destroying his efforts in trying to secure a peace process. Apparently, even with the CDS present, Garba was his usual obstreperous self. As Nellis said afterwards, he wasn’t in a position to say anything and thought that perhaps he should have congratulated the Nigerian for being candid. As he commented at the time, at least everybody knew where they stood with each other.
It took the British military aid contingent and the Sierra Leonean Army several months of fence-building before anything resembling a working relationship was again in place. Although the situation improved with time, the relationship never reverted to what it had been before the ‘Makeni Road Strike’, as the newspapers called it.
The ongoing war and its daily rebel atrocities did not allow the impasse to go on indefinitely. Nellis’ ambush might have scored points, but the rebels retaliated and intensified their barbarism in all towns and villages under their control. Fortunately, most of the civilian population had already fled.
Six weeks after the incident, the UN asked Nellis to take the Hind and attack a village in the eastern part of the country. Under Operation Khukri, the area had come under strong Indian Air Force Mi-24 fire during the rescue of a batch of UN soldiers held hostage by the rebels. Indian gunships had seriously razed the place and Nellis was told that there were still some rebel targets intact, including a radio centre.
The idea was that I should hit the village the day after Operation Khukri. Out of nowhere, Garba—all charm and snake oil—gives me a clearance to eliminate any infrastructures that were still intact and, as he said, I was to kill anyone found there. He was even willing to give me ammo. It started to smell bad.
Nellis had a reputation for being able to detect anything devious, and to him this operation had the hallmarks of a typical underhanded Nigerian move. Moreover, by now even the UN higher-ups in New York were aware that Garba was up to no good. The motive became clear soon enough. Garba’s intent was to transfer blame for the destruction wrought by the Indian Air Force gunships onto Nellis and the Sierra Leonean Air Wing. This, in turn, would invite UN censure and allow the Nigerian general to tell the rebels that his people had never been involved in any attack.
‘I wasn’t prepared to become Garba’s scapegoat for any UN whitewash’, Nellis declared because, as he said, ‘we had a fairly good measure of these people by then.’
Stretching the limits of his own credibility, Nellis reported to the UN office at the Mammy Yoko Hotel later that same day that neither of his aircraft was serviceable. He added that it would be impossible to carry out any strikes for a day or two. He was convinced that had he gone ahead and made the attack as Garba had suggested, pressure would have been placed on Kabbah’s government to restrict all operational flights involving the Hinds. He and the rest of the crew might even have been expelled from Sierra Leone.
As Nellis says, looking back, the Makeni raid affair dripped with duplicity. Moreover, it had a direct effect on the ultimate course of the war and it surprised nobody to learn afterwards that once the people involved in this double-cross were identified, the British started to play a more pronounced role in the struggle. The man directly responsible for the turnabout, says Nellis, was the future British Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, a ‘lowly’ brigadier at the time.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HOW THE WAR IN SIERRA LEONE WAS FOUGHT
With the benefit of hindsight, it is now known that there was an enormous amount of intrigue and double-play on the part of the British Government during the civil war in Sierra Leone. In an edition of the satirical magazine Punch, published in October 2000, about a year before it was all over, Pete Sawyer declared that ‘whoever wins the bloodbath of Sierra Leone, a group of British businesses can’t lose’.
In fact, Sawyer maintained that duplicitous dealings in British companies might actually ‘have exacerbated the conflict in the relentless drive to control Sierra Leone’s diamond resources’. It was, in Sawyer’s words, ‘a really ugly scramble for mineral wealth with international mining conglomerates pulling all the strings despite the pious words about Britain’s “ethical” foreign policy’. Harsh words, but true. Although he doesn’t say as much, all these backroom machinations were the reason there was such a brouhaha about Sandline and the so-called involvement with a mercenary pilot. It was all intended to deflect attention from the real issue, and precious stones lay at the heart of it.
When the British decided to become fully involved in the war, 200 men from 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment (who seized Lungi International Airport) were sent, followed soon afterwards by a contingent of Royal Marines in May 2000, and the war went into overdrive. They were soon joined by the carrier HMS Illustrious and the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean. Meanwhile, four Chinook helicopters were flown directly to West Africa from the United Kingdom, making it the longest operational delivery sortie yet achieved by these bulky craft.
Lieutenant Colonel Rob Symonds was the Military Liaison Officer, British High Commission, Freetown at the time. His comments about what was going on are instructive:
When the war in Sierra Leone started again on May 6, 2000, Neall Ellis was among the first to go into action. He was sometimes averaging three or four combat missions a day in the government Hind helicopter gunship. Twice, he went up six times in a 24-hour period, the last sortie having taken place after dark using night vision goggles to spot rebel concentrations. His logbook shows that in eight weeks he clocked more than 130 combat missions. Pilots in the majority of the world’s air forces—unless they are in a major war—rarely see that much action during the course of their careers.
This is a significant tribute to Nellis from one of the men who was at the heart of much of the war, and the two men remain firm friends—there are few people who, once having been embraced by this remarkable aviator, fall out with him.
Just abo
ut everything that happened in Sierra Leone’s air war during 2000 revolved about the Air Wing operations room at Cockerill Barracks. More properly known as the Corps Operations Centre, it was a kind of home from home for Nellis and his guys. An untidy place, which had a certain disordered charm about it, it was a combination of office, social club, intelligence clearing house, food store, telephone answering service, map room and conference centre.
Situated well away from the main block at Army Headquarters, the expansive, sparsely furnished ground floor office was entered through a pair of steel doors. Once inside, squarely in the middle of the room, was the desk of Sindaba Meri, the head of the Air Wing’s four-man Ethiopian technical squad who kept the gunships flying. Stashed against one of the far walls was a pile of automatic weapons, mostly AKs. Of necessity, while the assets were airborne, the steel doors remained locked.
Cardboard boxes, some of them half open, lay clustered about. They held propaganda leaflets which were to be dropped on enemy positions. However, that usually happened only during an operational flight once all the ammo had gone, and then with reluctance. Nellis made it clear that he didn’t like the idea of dropping pieces of paper in areas where the rebels were active. He argued that, while justifiable if it saved lives, the exercise exposed him and the crew unnecessarily to ground fire. Also, it put the helicopter at risk. ‘The gooks know that when I’m dropping that shit … I’m not going to be using my weapons’, he remonstrated with one of the British officers.
Still, he went along with it because he had to, and the gunship made several pamphlet drops that urged the rebels to come in under a UN-brokered amnesty. They were told that all they had to do was hand in their guns at any UN post and they would receive cash for them. Curiously, quite a few did as the war progressed.