by Al Venter
Nellis wasn’t a braggadocio because, simply put, he wasn’t that sort of person. Instead, most of his off-the-cuff statements about what he did for a living were rarely more than a succession of statements of fact. British pilots who flew with him and spent time in his company would tell you that Nellis was among the most self-effacing of individuals they’d met. As one of them commented, ‘he’s very atypically the war hero’. Someone else was heard to say that this was a man who had long ago learnt to sublimate his fears to the extent that some of his colleagues considered him reckless. Coping with the unknown, obviously, had to be part of it, but he was also relentless in the face of fire. Certainly, some of the things that he did were terrifying.
Naturally, there have been questions about the way that Nellis operated, especially as he repeatedly went in on a variety of targets, at Makeni and elsewhere, without regard for the SAMs with which the rebels were equipped. With this in mind, it didn’t help that he’d sometimes hover interminably over clusters of rebels, some of whom must have had him in their sights.
While the way he fought his war wasn’t everybody’s recipe for survival, his actions in the end gave him the targets he sought. In some of the engagements he knew that the enemy had heavy weaponry, even if they didn’t use it to their best advantage. There was always a surfeit of DShK and gas-operated NSV 12.7mm heavy support weapons in rebel hands because dozens were taken from UN units that capitulated early on in their deployment. They also had quite a few wheeled, twin-barrelled 14.5mm KPVs, which is a most effective anti-aircraft weapon. Nellis would hover over likely rebel concentrations in the hope that they would use said weapons. Occasionally they did, exposing their positions, which Nellis would then destroy. This rather frightening tactic was actually safer than it seemed as the people handling the weapons inevitably had dreadful aim.
Eventually, the Hind was causing so much damage that the rebel command upped the price on Nellis’ head to US$2 million. Australian broadcaster Mark Corcoran reported that he saw a message addressed to the merc pilot saying that ‘if we ever catch you, we’ll cut your heart out and eat it’. Of course, that sort of thing appealed to Nellis. He was actually a little flattered and would quietly chuckle to himself. Then he’d say something about anybody who knew Africa would be aware that the chances of collecting any money at all ranked somewhere between zero and nil. It was all hearsay, he’d argue, and he might actually have been right, because most of the time even he got it third, or even fifth hand. However, the rebels did eventually give his gunship a name. One of the rebels taken captive near Lunsar said that it had been dubbed, in Mende one of the local African languages, ‘Wor Wor Boy’, which means ‘Ugly Boy’.
It was interesting that there were pilots from a host of nations who were eager to fly with Nellis. He was constantly getting calls from friends or ‘friends of friends’ abroad. Most would have liked to join him ‘just for the experience’. Quite a few were willing to fly for nothing. However, these were short-term options and Nellis was wary of taking on anybody who lacked commitment. He had discovered to his cost that under the brittle crust of some fliers’ camaraderie, there lay paranoia, particularly with some of the Americans who wafted through the region.
Sierra Leone was so far off the beaten tourist track that he had to question the motives of anyone who willingly bought an air ticket to a country enmeshed in civil war simply for the sake of seeing what it was like. It didn’t make sense, he reckoned, especially when those involved were throwing dollars about as if they owned the place, while everyone else was counting their pennies.
Some of the Americans worried Nellis. He felt they were different from the average Europeans. Nellis confided once that he never really knew where he stood with many of them. Most would view the world loftily, with the kind of detached amusement that didn’t warrant close attention. He said that he often had to ask himself what their real agenda was.
He was aware that in Africa quite a few of these Americans were involved with Washington’s multi-tiered intelligence services—CIA, DIA, State Department and so on. Nellis didn’t have to be told to be wary, because that came with the job. Naturally, there was the occasional American flier who was willing to sully his reputation with no questions asked. However, once Nellis started to explain how things worked and that the locals would kill for the Swatch on your arm or your Nikes, most were appalled that he worked in such terrible conditions. To some, they were conditions that were practically primordial. It didn’t take these newcomers long to discover that the Sierra Leonean Government had no support system for the Air Wing if things came unstuck.
‘Support system?’ Nellis would query cynically. ‘Shit, we don’t even have the flares we need for our missile dispensers!’ There wasn’t the money and, anyway, the crew had long ago learnt to live with the way it was, he’d explain. Consequently, few American pilots hung about Freetown for long. Even some of the NGOs in Freetown such as ICI of Oregon, who had their own helicopters, got former Soviet pilots to handle their machines for them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
OPERATION BARRAS—THE FINAL PHASE IN SIERRA LEONE
As Tim Butcher recalls in an article he did for the London Daily Mail, ‘It was a famous military coup de théâtre—the spectacular SAS rescue of British troops held by vicious Sierra Leone guerrillas.’ The real story, he maintained, ‘was 200 rebels killed, their corpses hidden, and the truth buried by Tony Blair’.1
Neall Ellis is more forthright because he was there. He was a participant in the one of the most successful rescue efforts in recent times, which, he reckons, was as good as it got because of the incredible level of planning that went into getting the British hostages back.
The main problem facing Whitehall was that Operation Palliser, the British Armed forces operation in Sierra Leone, was over and Foday Sankoh’s rebels were all but vanquished, with Sankoh himself having been taken prisoner. Therefore, almost all British forces and their air assets, including helicopters, had been withdrawn.
Then came disaster, as a small contingent of British troops were taken hostage by a rebel group. Almost overnight, the Ministry of Defence had to set in motion a major West African rescue operation. Nellis remembers:
Apart from two Lynx helicopters, which arrived on HMS Ocean and HMS Illustrious, the British had to fly in three Chinook HC2 heavy-lift, transport helicopters from Britain. It had been done before. The first time that British forces went in, four Chinooks were flown out to Africa, and at the time the effort was regarded as the longest single transit by Chinooks ever attempted.
One of many villages occupied by the rebels that became a target of the mercenary aviator. Smoke can be observed emerging from a grass-roofed hit, centre, following a strike by the Hind. Author’s photo
Nellis, with a senior SAS operator on board his Sierra Leonean Air Wing Mi-24, was to play a significant role in the drama that subsequently unfolded. As he recalls, ‘we gave the rebels enough of a thumping for them never to be able to reorganise into an effective force in that area again … I reckon our Hind must have been responsible for scores of them, all armed dissidents … never mind the enemy killed by the ground forces or the Lynxes’.
Neall Ellis was told by the British commander at Cockerill Barracks that after British forces had done what they had been tasked to achieve, the area around the former rebel base was his to dominate.
I was told that the entire area had been frozen and was my responsibility. I was also instructed to do what was needed to clear out the rebels from the region … the West Side Boys needed to be taught a proper lesson, was the consensus.
I was operational for two days after Operation Barras and, cumulatively, we must have been in the air over the disputed zone for at least 12 hours. Then, I went back there a few days after it was all over and it was amazing to see how soon the original inhabitants had returned. The rebels were history and those poor people who had been persecuted by the West Side Boys for months, were able to get on with their normal li
ves once more.
What took place on that momentous September day in 2000 started with 11 members of the British Army’s Royal Irish Regiment being kidnapped. They were moving about in the Occra Hills to the east of Freetown in their Land Rovers more than two weeks previously, on 25 August 2000. They were on their way back from visiting an element of the Jordanian UN contingent, although there is some dispute about that.
The British soldiers were making their way down the main road that linked the town of Yonibana to Freetown. Why they were there at all remains open to question as that part of Sierra Leone’s Northern province had seen much bloodshed during the course of the civil war and it was known that it was an area where there was still an undefined rebel presence: not large numbers as in the earlier period, but potent enough to make the area dangerous..
Following a casual meeting along the way with what seemed to be a fairly amicable group of young men, Major Alan Marshall, the leader of the patrol, was persuaded, ostensibly on a friendly basis, to get talking to a group who called themselves West Side Boys. The British soldiers, accompanied by Lieutenant Musa Bangura, their Sierra Leonean Army liaison officer, were then held up by two or three young kids carrying AKs. The leaders were called and, once disarmed, the Brits were forced to follow them to their base.
Their captors declared themselves to be members of a military group called the West Side Boys which, under the circumstances, was hardly notable because there were scores of similar groups of young men operating throughout the country. In fact, hardly anybody had ever heard of them before, or of their brutally unstable and psychotic boss, the 24-year-old Foday Kallay.
Once in custody, all the hostages were taken to an area adjacent to the Rokel River, where Kallay’s main base had been established in the village of Gberi Bana. The Land Rovers remained on the opposite bank where two more villages, Magbeni and Forodugu, were situated.
London was immediately advised of the abduction and within 48 hours the first of several preliminary reconnaissance missions were launched by both the SAS and SBS. They found the area to be difficult to traverse as the Rokel River was on one side and on the other there were swamps and rice paddies, features of many of the tiny settlements in the area.
Although efforts were made to communicate with Kallay, he warned that any sudden action would result in the deaths of all 12 men. As Nellis commented at the time:
It didn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to realise that the only way the Brits were going to get their people back would be to rescue them … Kallay might have been an idiot, but he was also an exceptionally dangerous idiot, known for executing his own men for disobeying orders. Also, because of the difficult, waterlogged terrain the rescuers would have to come in by air, probably by chopper.
At that stage, already having been given the go ahead to launch a rescue mission by Prime Minister Tony Blair, the three Chinook helicopters were despatched to West Africa from the UK. The 5,600-ton Sir Percivale, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary (Landing Ship Logistics) that had taken part in the Falklands invasion, and was the first British ship to re-enter Stanley Harbour after the Argentineans had been overwhelmed, was diverted from operations in the Mediterranean to Freetown.
By now, Brigadier John Holmes had been appointed overall chief of the rescue mission and had already flown out to Freetown to coordinate arrangements. While negotiations continued throughout this period, with the aim of bringing the matter to a non-violent end, it soon became clear that the West Side Boys were both belligerent and uncooperative. Because they had hostages, they would argue, they were ‘untouchable’.
Meanwhile, small squads of British Special Forces clandestinely surveyed the immediate area around where the British soldiers were being held and made preparations for the rescue. They meticulously laid out a flat-plan of the hostage house and within days were rehearsing for a full assault. According to Tim Butcher, ‘when Barras was launched, the troops were given free rein to engage the enemy’.
Surprisingly, the West Side Boys released five of their prisoners, all of them British. They kept the other six British soldiers and Lieutenant Bungara, who was treated particularly viciously. Imprisoned in typical RUF-style in a pit in the ground, they beat him regularly with their rifle butts and would also defecate onto him from above.
Butcher tells us that the Special Forces observation team used high-tech listening equipment and vision-enhancers to assemble the clearest possible intelligence picture of where the six prisoners were being held and the exact defensive capabilities of their captors. A British Special Forces source told him:
What the hidden troopers heard and saw from the secret observation post changed everything. West Side Boys gunmen were inflicting a violent sexual assault on at least one of the British prisoners. That was the point when the decision was taken to go in and get them out.
Cockpit on one of the British helicopters that took part in the Barras raid to free a dozen hostages held by the RUF rebels. Author’s photo
From the start of Operation Palliser, Neall Ellis had worked closely with some of the SAS operators deployed to Sierra Leone. In fact, in the Barras raid their captain and team leader was a South African.
Nellis would routinely take one or more of their operators up in the Hind on scouting missions into the interior, in large part because there was nobody else in the West African state who had spent so much time flying over Sierra Leone. Essentially, he had intimate knowledge of the people, the towns and the deployment of the RUF rebels. He had effectively become a valued reconnaissance asset for the British and could also inflict serious damage on the rebels with the Mi-24’s rockets and Gatling whenever contact was made with the rebels.
It was no secret that Whitehall had given instructions that the South African and his mercenary team were to be kept at a distance. While the British Ministry of Defence accepted that the Air Wing was integral to the Sierra Leonean defence establishment, that association was not to extend to British military interests, London emphatically declared.
However, as one SAS observer told Nellis, what the bosses back home didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt, so the liaison went on right to the end. It became even more pronounced during Operation Barras. Nellis recalls:
Although we only came into the picture immediately prior to the raid on Gberi Bana and other villages in the vicinity, we got word from the senior SAS officer a couple of days before that action would be taken and that we were to be on standby when it happened. He wasn’t overly specific, except to say that it would be a major effort and that everybody involved would be playing a role, including us.
It made good sense, of course, Nellis commented afterwards. All other British offensive capabilities had left the country after Operation Palliser was over. Fairly early on he was also told that the entire region around the Rokel Creek where the West Side Boys had their camps had been declared a no-fly area.
They didn’t want me nosing in there with the Hind and shooting the shit out of anything and possibly causing Kallay to do something stupid … it made good sense.
British ground troops vigorously patrolled all approach roads in the vicinity of Freetown following their arrival in the country under then Brigadier David Richards, early 2000. Author’s photo
Apart from that we didn’t have much to do with either the SAS or SBS guys. They very much kept to themselves, although a couple of them did come to the house one evening to talk business, but it was the only time. They didn’t socialise much either … in fact, I don’t think I ever saw any of their lads in Paddy’s Bar … they were a very private bunch of guys.
On a business level, Nellis reckons his relations with the British Special Forces personnel were excellent:
We spoke the same kind of language. Then, a few days before the op, one of their electronic boffins fitted a UHF radio aerial to the Hind and I was told that one of the SAS people, somebody from headquarters, would be going up with us to coordinate things on the ground. We were quite chuffed at the responsibility
.
Nellis remembers the day of the attack well:
Then, the day before it all happened, I got a message late afternoon telling me that they were going in at first light the next morning and that we all had to be at the base at 04h00 hours for our briefing. I was aware that there had already been a lot of meetings and briefings among British military personnel, but we were never a part of them.
We were there on time and were shown the plan, which basically involved the SAS guys fast roping from the choppers directly onto the heads of Foday Kallay and his men at Gberi Bana.
British serviceman prepares his heavy machine-gun mounted on the cab of an army Land Rover. Author’s photo
The Paras, he was told, would be dropped in a green field across the river. Their area of operations would be the area around Magbeni and Forodugu where they would suppress any threat of a counterattack from rebels based there.
I interjected and said that it wasn’t a field that the Paras were going into, but a rice paddy. I also told them that in parts of the adjoining areas the water, which was interspersed with sections of swamp and mud, was quite deep. That stopped the briefing officer for a few moments, but he replied that it was too late to do anything about it: the men were about to go in.