In his written confession, Simon describes in detail the mad scramble to procure weapons for the project. At first Nick and Simon sought help from Nick’s business partner – a South African named Henri van der Westhuizen. Together they tried their old contact in Uganda. It failed. Then they discussed acquiring weapons from Kenya, Burundi or Zambia. Those contacts failed, too. As a last resort, Nick opted to purchase the rifles and ammunition they needed in Harare, from Zimbabwe Defence Industries (ZDI) – the country’s state-owned armaments company.
It was a shock to read, in Simon’s words, how they had settled on Zimbabwe as a source for their lethal hardware. To my untrained eye, that could not, to say the very least, have seemed an attractive option. It was fair to assume that British and South African mercenaries are not exactly beloved of President Robert Mugabe – especially not ones with close ties to Britain’s political elite, or those with a two-decade history of undercover warfare against him. It must have been obvious to Simon and Nick that Simon risked becoming the star attraction in Mugabe’s war of words with what Mugabe styled Tony Blair’s ‘gay gangster’ government. They must, I thought, have been under extreme pressure to have taken such a risk.
Yet Simon wrote that he was reassured by the fact that Nick felt it was safe to proceed. Nick had done deals with ZDI before.
I pored over the wealth of information detailed by Simon in his account of the failed operation. He said he and Nick flew to Harare on 8 February 2004 – where a ZDI representative ushered them through customs – much like, I imagined, the Red Berets had whisked Nick and I through immigration in Conakry airport. Simon then described how, at a hotel in town, he and Nick sat down with one of the company’s functionaries called Martin Bird, and discussed their military requirements.
‘NDT put the order for the EG project to MB,’ he wrote, ‘who said that he did not see any difficulty. NDT then surprised me by saying that he had a second order of ammunition only. MB saw no problem with this, either.’
When Bird had left, Nick explained that the Equatorial Guinea order was too small for ZDI to take seriously, and it needed to be bumped up to be made worth their while. His second order was for a rebel group in the Congo – and he ‘was very adamant that Zimbabwe Defence Industries would be interested in making friendly contact with the DRC rebels’.
Later, according to the confession, Nick and Simon paid ZDI boss Colonel Tshinga Dube a visit at the company’s offices. Simon explained that the weapons were needed to guard a mine in northeast Congo, near the border with Uganda. Apparently uninterested, Dube could hardly bring himself to look at the map of the DRC that Simon pointed to, as the men struggled in vain to hold the colonel’s attention. Another meeting followed; this time Nick went into see Dube alone, to discuss the ammunition order for the Congolese rebels. Simon said that Nick emerged in high spirits – Dube had reportedly been pleased with the prospect that ZDI and the Zimbabwe Intelligence services would gain a ‘direct and positive link to the new DRC rebel grouping’. Contracts were signed on 10 February with ZDI’s Group Captain Hope Mutize: one for Equatorial Guinea by Nick and Simon; the other, by Nick alone, for ‘the Katanga’ uprising in the Congo.
I knew that the mining cover-story was an irrelevant ploy – but the rebel group that Nick wanted to supply wasn’t. His planned operation in Congo’s Katanga province – described to me in Liberia and Brussels – had evidently become an integral part of the Equatorial Guinea coup plot. The British press passed over the Katangese rebels, licking their lips at the news-feast served up by Simon’s increasingly unenviable predicament. I stared at Simon’s handwriting in astonishment. Nick had not been planning one operation, but two.
Simon continued that on 11 February he and Nick had flown from Harare to Ndola – a town in northern Zambia near the Congolese border. Here, according to Simon, they met ‘Abu who was apparently the leader of the Katanga uprising shortly to occur’ – the same man, I suspected, that Nick had talked to me about in Liberia. Abu was told by Nick and Simon that ‘he must secure the airstrip at Kolwezi for 24 hours so that his equipment could be delivered to him’. I looked up Kolwezi on the map. It’s a small town near the Katangese city of Lubumbashi – site of the Shinkolobwe uranium mine.
The narrative of the plot unfolded like a tragic farce. Every act described seemed laden with premonitions of the failure to come. Simon did not say exactly what was supposed to happen in Kolwezi, but the details emerged piecemeal into the public domain over the coming weeks.
According to aviation records, intelligence sources, insiders and the investigations of journalists on two continents, it eventually became clearer what had happened. A mercenary pilot called Crause Steyl, who had flown for Executive Outcomes, flew to the Canary Islands – an outcrop of Spanish territory in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of West Africa – and waited there with three alleged plotters: Greg Wales (said to be Simon’s political adviser), David Tremain (a businessman and mining expert), Karim Fallaha (a Lebanese businessman) and another pilot. Their job was to escort the exiled Severo Moto – who was also in the Canaries – back to victory in Malabo once Nick and Simon had mopped up. According to Simon’s confession, Moto would be escorted to Malabo to coincide with a local military and civilian uprising. Nick’s men were to act as Moto’s bodyguard.
Before dawn on 19 February 2004, sixty-four mercenaries – including several of Africa’s most notorious guns-for-hire – embarked onto two Dakotas at the Wonderboom civilian airfield just outside of Pretoria. After making the short hop to Polokwane International Airport, the men cleared immigration and flew north.
I supposed that in Kolwezi the men and the weapons from Zimbabwe would be paired up on the runway, and cross-loaded onto an Antonov 12 cargo plane belonging to Nick’s PANAC company – which, according to Simon, had flown down from Malabo to meet them. Once all the (now armed) mercenaries were on board, the Antonov would then have returned to Equatorial Guinea – where Nick and his advance party would be waiting to greet them before they stormed the capital.
Up to the departure of the Antonov for Harare, everything went like clockwork. And then wheels came off – literally. Simon’s confession fills in the details.
Landing at Cameroon en route from Malabo, the Antonov’s nose-wheel broke. Severely delayed, the aging cargo plane managed to take off again. Simon waited in Harare, ready to load the weapons.
In a moment of extraordinary comic timing, the Antonov was then crippled again shortly after take-off and forced to make an emergency landing in Lubumbashi after its nose-cone was struck by a goose. Exactly what happened next in that corner of Katanga was unclear. ‘In the meantime,’ Simon wrote, ‘the rebels had not secured Kolwezi and the whole operation was cancelled.’ Either the rebels did not in fact exist – or, in time-honoured tradition, they had failed to show up.
The planes carrying the mercenaries landed instead at Ndola, in sleepy, law-abiding Zambia – presumably lest they be confronted, defenceless, by the infamously inhospitable Congolese Army. Here they waited for three hours at a commercial airport before flying back home again – where most of them were installed in the Hotel 224. Several days later, Moto and the other men on the Canary Islands headed their separate ways. What Nick and Simon had tried to pull off wasn’t just a coup d’état: it was a breathtakingly complex enterprise that had involved moving almost one hundred people in six countries thousands of miles across Central Africa on half a dozen flights – the successful outcome of which was entirely predicated on the exactly timed uprising of a hitherto-unknown rebel group in one of Africa’s most unstable regions.
What puzzled me most of all was not why Nick’s African Adventure had failed the first time around, but why – given the extent of his experience in covert operations in the army and his recent experience in Liberia with me – he’d ever imagined it could succeed at all.
And yet, seemingly undeterred by this setback, Simon and Nick pressed on in what appeared to be a stupendous example of the triumph of
hope over experience.
Simon related in detail how he and Nick had headed back to Harare immediately after the disaster in Kolwezi, agreeing a $10,000 surcharge with ZDI’s Martin Bird to compensate for the inconvenience of messing up the collection. Ditched in favour of more reliable air transport, the goose-battered Antonov was retired in place of the Boeing 727 jet airliner: purchased in haste in the US, it was flown into South Africa, arriving in the early hours of 7 March, three days after Nick had made it back to Equatorial Guinea. In the Canaries, Moto and the gang were in place again, too. On 6 March, Simon – accompanied by former Recce and EO mercenary Harry Carlse and ex-Special Task Force policeman Lourens Horn – flew to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here he met with a man called Tim Roman – an American contractor and confidant of Congo’s president Joseph Kabila – while Carlse and Horn stayed with the aircraft. Simon claimed he was looking for a back-up aeroplane – and Kabila’s blessing for their operation. Roman knew Colonel Dube at ZDI well; he ‘had flown similar missions in his aircraft before’, and ‘thought he would be able to do it’ – and promised to be in contact once he’d chatted to Kabila. Simon flew back to Harare with Carlse and Horn. Simon checked in with the ZDI representatives, and waited.
Here Simon’s neat, handwritten confession ended – but I could piece together the rest for myself.
Back at Wonderboom airport, the newly arrived 727 was loaded with non-lethal military kit, including bolt-cutters, boots, sleeping bags, medical kits and radios. Then it was filled with sixty-four soldiers and three crew. Again making the short hop to Polokwane to clear immigration, the plane touched down at Harare airport at seven o’clock in the evening, taxiing to the military zone as agreed with the airport authorities. The weapons would be loaded on site: there would be no need to cross-load in unstable Congo, they would be able to tool up over the Congo – the aircraft’s hold was pressurised, heated, and accessible from the cabin in flight.
Unbeknown to them, however, the mercenaries had reached the end of the line. It was already over. Simon, Carlse and Horn boarded the plane with customs officials, as the main force of mercenaries simply sat and waited in their seats. Then the three of them were taken by Hope Mutize, the ZDI representative, to the parachute hangar nearby to get their hands on the weapons. They prised open the crates to show the lethal cache within. Carlse complained that the consignment did not match Simon’s order. Moments later they were surrounded by soldiers and plainclothes police who had been hiding in the shadows. They were cuffed, and bundled into waiting vehicles. Seized by other Zimbabwean soldiers, the men on the 727 were arrested, and driven straight to jail.
Eighteen hours later Nick and his team were picked up in Malabo.
Do not pass go. Do not collect oil revenue.
My emotions had ranged from horror at Nick’s arrest, to disbelief at the plan they’d devised. Then a flash of anger flared up. You wanted me to risk my life for this shambles?
It was unthinkable that Nick could have put together a plan that involved taking so many apparently avoidable risks. The idea that Simon, a former SAS officer, could have dreamed it up with him beggared belief. Had I misread it all? I telephoned a friend of mine recently demobbed from the SAS himself – a long-serving sergeant-major with nearly two decades of operational experience, not long returned from Afghanistan. Familiar with the details of the coup plot from the media and his own security industry sources, he gave his professional opinion on the doomed Adventure.
‘What you have here, mate,’ he chirped down the phone, ‘is what could, in all fairness, only be described as an astonishing catalogue of buffoonery.’
It was embarrassing to hear his verdict. He knew Nick and I were friends, but he didn’t hold back.
‘Rule One: never marry up the men with the kit until you’re on target – you’ve got to have cast-iron deniability until the key moment. Rule Two: do not buy the weapons from an overtly hostile, tyrannical regime. Rule Three: if at first you don’t succeed, do not try again – you’ve got to be prepared to walk away. There’s no way you could commit to an operation like this until twenty-four to forty-eight hours beforehand – and that would be completely dependent on the intelligence you were receiving.’
‘But what about Simon?’ I protested. ‘Surely a former Special Air Service officer would have considered all that, and made a tactically sound judgement despite the apparent odds against success?’
‘James, Simon’s reputation is not – er, how shall I put this? – uniformly excellent. He only served two-thirds of his tour with the Regiment. Apparently, there was some kind of incident – a difference of opinion about operational matters – and he decided to leave.’
‘Mate, are you sure?’
‘Yep. I’m sure. The other thing to bear in mind is that he might have been told he was good to go. But he wasn’t, right? So either his intel was compromised, or he was set up.’
Perhaps Simon and Nick had been beguiled by their own previous victories with Executive Outcomes – which had, after all, been the most successful private army to fight in the modern era. In Sierra Leone, their contingent of around 100 men had fought and defeated a rebel army of 3,000–4,000, often psychopathic killers. Their thinking was clear: if 100 of their men could defeat the Sierra Leonean RUF rebels – even if they’d only been up against a hard core of around 600 fighters – then two-thirds that number could take out a despised despot on a tiny island protected by ‘a bunch of momos’.
I hung up and contemplated Nick’s planning. Doing so posed an obvious, if often overlooked, question: what on earth would lead Simon, Nick and the backers of the operation to think – truly believe – that they could overthrow the government of an independent sovereign nation, install a puppet president and run it as an ongoing business concern?
The answer was a surprisingly simple one: the fact that African history is peppered with the often tragic antics of Europeans and white Africans who have done, or nearly done, just that. Simon, Nick and the other operatives involved in the Equatorial Guinea coup plot were the last in a pedigree of mercenary whose days on the continent looked like they were finally up.
As the days wore on, my anger towards Nick burned itself out. My dismay at his involvement developed into a curiosity about why he’d gone ahead with it at all. In late January, he’d left me with the strong impression that he was walking away from the coup – but ten days later he’d placed the weapons order with Simon in Harare. What was more, Nick had had several hours in which to escape from Equatorial Guinea after Simon’s arrest – but his wife had been adamant that he’d been seized at his house the next morning, having made no attempt to run. Perhaps it was just greed and a thirst for adventure that had compelled him to go, and a potentially fatally misplaced sense of his own security that had prompted him to stay; or perhaps he thought that he was being protected – that the operation was being underwritten by one of the players who had enabled similar mercenary operations in the past: former colonial powers; the Americans; and the South African Government.
Severo Moto, pretender to the throne in Malabo, was at least supported in exile by Spain, Equatorial Guinea’s former colonial power; the US military also had links to several of the mercenaries, and the plane that took them to their fate was previously operated by the US Air Force – but none of that added up to proof of external support. The most tantalising question – in an ocean of conundrums – was what South Africa’s role had been in the entire enterprise. It was inconceivable to me that Nick – a Special Forces legend, high-profile arms dealer and former Executive Outcomes military commander – would not have established contacts with South African Intelligence: for all I knew, he could have been on their pay-roll himself. The difficulty would be in ascertaining if the South Africans foiled it, or were themselves thwarted.
Prompted by Simon and Nick’s confessions, the Government of Equatorial Guinea pointed the finger at the people they believed backed the coup financially – including
Greg Wales, David Tremain and Karim Fallaha, all of whom had been in the Canaries with Moto in February and March. All of them denied it. The main backer, though, the overlord who they said had brought Simon and Moto together, was, they alleged, the Lebanese oil tycoon named as Ely Calil.
Born in Nigeria, Calil was supremely well connected to the West African oil elite, and estimated by the Sunday Times to be worth £100 million in his own right. He was also closely connected to the British political establishment: a friend of Peter Mandelson (to whom he rented a luxury apartment in 1999), he was also reported to know David Hart and Tim Bell (confidants and advisers to Margaret Thatcher during her prime ministership), and was said to be a former financial adviser to the novelist and convicted perjurer Jeffrey Archer.
According to Simon’s confession, Calil introduced Simon to Severo Moto in Madrid in May 2003. Calil, Simon maintained, had been funding Moto in exile, and wished to see him returned to Malabo. Calil refused to give interviews (he had not been photographed in public since 1972), and denied having anything to do with a coup. Almost immediately after that meeting – and the ones that Simon said followed soon thereafter – Nick and Simon had begun to plot the violent overthrow of Moto’s nemesis: President Obiang.
Trying to establish who might be behind the plot seemed like a daunting task. My connection to the operation was solely through Nick and Simon, both of whom were unable to communicate freely with the outside world, and certainly not with me. Nick had said that a Lebanese had invested heavily into the project – but that didn’t prove either Calil or Fallaha’s involvement. I didn’t know where to start, or even if I should. I suspected it would be very hard to unearth anything that would really help Nick, and comparatively easy to discover a great deal that would be sure to harm him.
Then, on 26 March, I got a call from a man who introduced himself as a friend of Nick.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 33