‘Well, at the risk of pissing people off that I really don’t want to piss off, what I’m trying to work out is exactly what Nick did have planned – and why.’
I confided that doing an arms deal in Zimbabwe had baffled me.
Henri began to talk.
He confirmed that the initial plan, outlined by Nick to me in May, had been to use Guinea Conakry as the launch pad for the operation – the men were to have been trained there and then depart for Equatorial Guinea by ship. When the plan changed, Simon Mann had approached Henri through Nick in January 2004 and asked him to procure the weapons for the coup. A deadline of 23 February was insisted upon because the operation had to be completed before the Spanish general election in March – though why this has been so important, Henri had at the time not been certain. Henri and Nick then travelled to Uganda to source the guns from their old contact in Kampala, but the deal fell through – one of the key players, a senior Ugandan army commander, was unavailable – and the pair returned empty-handed. Simon lost his temper at the news, and Henri walked. From that point, he claimed, he had nothing more to do with the operation.
‘Nick had about one month to turn it around. But it wasn’t possible to guarantee. Even the weather, anything, could have delayed it. You just can’t guarantee that sort of deal in that time frame.’
The deal transferred to Zimbabwe Defence Industries.
As the date for the coup drew nearer, Nick had confided his fears in Henri.
‘Nick realised he was in shit, and asked me to go to the Scorpions.’
The Scorpions were a sort of South African FBI, with a reputation for fearless investigations into organised crime and corruption.
‘He wanted to talk to the Scorpions about the coup?’ I asked. ‘What, to get their blessing?’
‘Yes. He knew the operation was a fuck-up.’
Henri said he tried to arrange a meeting on Nick’s behalf, but it didn’t work out. Time ran short and Henri went alone for a meeting with Bulelani Ngcuka, the National Director of Public Prosecutions, on 18 February – the day before the first coup attempt.
I stared at Henri across the table. It was an extraordinary admission. Ngcuka had helped to establish the Scorpions and was closely linked to South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki. Ngcuka’s wife, Phumzile, had been made Minister of Minerals and Energy in 1999. It was a position that would have made Ngcuka particularly interested in the political stability of Equatorial Guinea – Africa’s third-largest oil producer.
‘What did they say? I mean, what could they say?’
I was incredulous. Nick had asked that Henri elaborate on the plan to the country’s top investigator, knowing, in all likelihood, that it would have been passed to the president himself.
‘They clearly knew about the operation already. They didn’t ask a single pertinent question. They didn’t say if they agreed or not – in fact, they hardly spoke. I was asked to find out more information about the UK angle – Simon Mann and the backers. We agreed they should be investigated.’
Henri felt that by not saying ‘no’, the Scorpions had given their tacit support. He inferred that it was the backers who were in the Government’s sights – and that Nick likely wouldn’t face any problems if he went ahead.
Henri’s revelation raised serious questions: if the Scorpions already knew about it, who told them – and who else knew? The answer was, apparently, quite a lot of people.
‘I knew that intelligence reports were being made on Simon’s activities,’ Henri told me.
An apartheid-era intelligence operative and freelance spook called Johann Smit had compiled a comprehensive and accurate dossier on Nick and Simon’s activities at the end of 2003, and passed it to the Equatoguineans, the South Africans, the British and the Americans.
‘I asked Simon if he was aware that he was probably being monitored,’ Henri continued. ‘He told me he had everything covered – that Nigel Morgan, his contact with the South African Secret Service, was providing him with all the intelligence reports.’
Nigel, whom I’d met only ten days before in London, denied this. Nevertheless he apparently had a central role to play. It was, Henri said, well known in intelligence circles that Nigel Morgan worked for the South African Secret Service – and that he and Johann Smit had once been business partners. The South African Government could have known about the plot for months – which would explain why details of my conversations were recorded in Morgan’s files.
The coup, Henri laughed, had even been discussed at a meeting in Chatham House – when a South African national working for Shell in corporate affairs (who was also apparently close to Mbeki) had warned that a mercenary invasion was imminent.
There was one last thing I needed to know from Henri. Had Nick tried to back out?
‘I was surprised when he did the ZDI deal. I was strongly under the impression that he wanted to concentrate on the legitimate businesses he’d set up in Equatorial Guinea. He told me that he’d handed over all military planning to Harry Carlse and wanted to walk away from the whole thing – but Simon told him that they couldn’t back out because the “investors” wouldn’t allow it. All I can tell you is that three weeks before the operation in March, Nick had no idea where any of the key targets were, including President Obiang. You know Nick. Would he really have gone ahead on that basis?’
As we finished our coffee, I asked him about his time in the military. He was, he said, fortunate to have had excellent colleagues to work with. A good friend during his career in military intelligence had been a police colonel called Eugene de Kock – whom Henri described as his mentor.
‘Yes, I see the colonel regularly. I still visit him in prison.’
Dubbed as ‘Prime Evil’ by the South African press, de Kock was serving a 212-year prison sentence for a string of murders.
Henri and I shook hands and agreed to meet again shortly. I left and briefed Carla, the director of the film we were making, who’d been patiently waiting in the car park. On camera, I repeated what Henri had told me. The meeting disturbed me – not just because of the weight of the information Henri imparted, but because of the window it opened onto a world I knew very little about. Nick had been, to me, the model of a professional soldier: despite killing in the service of apartheid, he had been a fighter, and not a murderer. The blood he’d shed had been on the battlefield, not in people’s living rooms. ‘We were very professional Special Forces,’ he once told me, ‘we never did anything wrong.’ But the men who served in the Civil Cooperation Bureau and the men who fought for Special Forces were inextricably linked, part of the same apartheid-state machinery.
Everything I knew about Nick led me to believe that, although he may have been with them, he was not one of them: because his conscience was clear, I had naïvely thought that mine could be, too. After all, he had never been called to account for his time in the military by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yet the more I learned about the plot, and Nick’s role in it, the less certain I could be of his intentions. What did it say about him that one of his closest friends was mentored by Eugene de Kock? If it was the case that a man can be judged by the company he keeps, then we might both have some tough questions to answer.
Three days later I re-connected with Dries. It was time to call in his offer to see Simon’s letters. Carla and I sat around a table in a bland lawyer’s meeting room with him and an attorney called Bernhard van der Hoven. Van der Hoven opened a file, and Dries spread out a collage of pages torn from National Geographic magazines and notebooks. They were covered with Simon Mann’s unmistakable handwriting. Carla and I looked at each other. I reached out my hand, and then checked myself.
‘May I?’
‘Yes, James. You can read them all,’ Dries agreed – his wide-open face beaming at us from across the narrow table.
The scrap-book of pages consisted of more than a dozen letters addressed by Simon to a variety of recipients.
‘Do you mind if we take notes?�
�� Carla asked. Again, the answer was yes. ‘Okay,’ she continued, looking at me now, ‘you read them and point out the bits we need, and I’ll copy them down. You know what we’re looking for.’
I dived in, and Carla began scribbling shorthand.
On top of the pile was an undated page in Simon’s writing that explained the code names employed in the correspondence. The first part read:
Code Scratchy is Mark Thatcher Gazza
Smelly = EC Gary Hersham
Among the cache were the ‘Wonga’ and ‘Smelly’ and ‘Scratcher’ letters that had already been leaked to the press. These letters indicated that, in order to finance the coup, Simon had approached different private investors to stump up lump sums around the $200,000 mark – presumably with the expectation of large returns at a later date. Most of the letters, though, had not been seen before.
On 21 March, he asked his correspondent, Timothy Robarts (who was not asked to finance the coup), to act as a lender-of-last-resort to his wife Amanda – Simon apparently had no idea how much in the way of ready funds was at her disposal – guaranteeing any loan with his word as a gentleman. ‘The first 5 days were very bad & not “Geneva Convention”,’ he’d written, ‘but we are OK and safe for the moment … What I was trying to do was RIGHT and the cause JUST. There is a lot of rubbish about mercenaries. At least, mercenaries are meant to fight for something they do not care about and get paid. We were trying very hard NOT to fight in a cause we did care about, and in which I have spent far too much of my own money!’
Money, and the moral justification of his actions, featured highly in much of the correspondence. Couched in the same terms of the means excusing the ends that I had used when convincing myself to say yes to Nick’s proposal, it was uncomfortable to read Simon’s self-justifications. Also on the 21st, he’d written to his financial assistant James Kershaw – by then turned state witness – saying that ‘Your pay can be justified by me alone if you take Hansard and Co. [the trust that oversaw Simon’s various financial entities] out of the loop. I hear NM [Nigel Morgan] is helping you manage all of this but you work for me. Do not allow any editing or redirecting of any of these communications.’ In a different letter he urges that Kershaw ‘should be pushing funds out of project accounts and into our personal account’. ‘JK has full power of attorney over all money etc,’ he writes. ‘He has the £ masterplan from my trusts and co. and the £ masterplan for this project.’
He asked that the letters be seen, initialled and returned to him. In that last respect, at the very least, Simon’s wishes had clearly been ignored. On a letter dated 19 March – in which he says he’s ‘just had a strange interview with the Angolans!!’ – Mark Thatcher’s email address was written with the postscript: ‘Mark – please forward this to Nigel – Please can you help us.’ In a separate missive, Simon writes Ely Calil’s email address out, and then next to it prints the message: ‘E – I am depending on you and trusting you to help us now.’ He also asks that Kershaw ‘should send the signed Logo/Panac [aviation] contract to Smelly’.
Much of the material was unnervingly direct – and some of it too intimate to describe.
The penultimate letter that Dries showed us apparently nailed the issue of why he and Nick had been so rushed at the beginning of the year. To an undisclosed recipient Simon wrote that ‘You should be aware of a meeting at Smelly’s Gaff with Smelly, K and Gazza Sunday 23 Feb? At that meeting they said they could only come up with 500 not the 1000 that I had asked for.’ ‘After some debate, out of desperation,’ he continued, ‘I asked Smelly if I raised $ or a straight personal loan from a third party [whether it] would be underwritten.’ Simon was apparently reassured that ‘he would pay me back for sure’.
‘We only got the money in time to start real work on 6 January with 16 February set as a deadline – & that after all the stop starts,’ Simon complains to the addressee. ‘Smelly must take a big chunk of the blame himself. All of last year he messed around with the £. You know that. Smelly ensured that we never had both the time and the £.’
‘Smelly’ was Ely Calil, the Lebanese oil tycoon; ‘Gazza’ was Gary Hersham, the British businessman who, also according to Simon’s confession, had introduced Simon to Calil in early 2003. There was nothing to suggest that Hersham was involved beyond allegedly being present at the meeting; there was also no indication of where the money originally came from, or proof of what, specifically, Calil thought Simon might be doing with it. Both men denied fundraising for a coup.
As I ploughed through Simon’s tatty pile of desperate pleas for help, recriminations and justifications, Nick’s name was conspicuous by its absence. In one of the letters, Simon found the space and time to recount a long joke about public schoolboys, but not once does he enquire after Nick’s – or the other Equatorial Guinea detainees’ – circumstances, treatment or prospects. Now the game was up, it was every man for himself.
Dries gathered up the ragged pages, and then slid black-and-white photocopies of some of the letters across the table to us.
‘You asked for some copies.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and then asked: ‘Who has seen these? I mean all of the ones we’ve seen, not just these copies?’
‘Billy Masetlha, the president’s national security adviser, has a set of bad copies. Rachel Gaskin has a full set of colour copies and these are the originals. That’s it.’
Carla and I took notes as he talked us through it. Gaskin, an American lawyer, was a confidant of the Mann family. Masetlha was South Africa’s domestic spy chief.
‘And why have you got them, Dries?’ Carla wanted to know.
‘To keep them safe, and to help the guys in Zim – and to help Nick and them up in EG.’
At this point Dries spelled out his demands. The cost of the lawyer in Zimbabwe was apparently 81,643 South African rand; the Equatoguinean lawyer 30,000 rand; and Dries’s personal travel costs so far a further 35,000 rand.
Carla and I looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and grudging respect: he was, if nothing else, straightforward.
‘We’ll get back to you,’ Carla pronounced, finishing the meeting. ‘Thanks for your time.’
They shook hands politely over the table. Van der Hoven showed us out. Safely back in Nick’s silver BMW, she turned to me as I turned over the ignition.
‘What did you make of that?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘call me old-fashioned, but when people demand cash like that, they should at least have the decency to point a gun at you.’
I looked out the front window, at the door to the office block.
‘Fuck it. Let’s buy ’em.’
Back at Nick’s house I sifted through photocopies and printouts that I had been collecting. Documents had recently surfaced in London and Pretoria that Nick himself might not have seen. They seemed to fill out the financial support – and expected returns – of the coup in specific detail.
The main promise of funding for Simon seemed to come from a group of Lebanese investors at the Beirut-registered Asian Trading and Investment Group SAL. Karim Fallaha, who had accompanied Greg Wales and Severo Moto on the Canary Islands, was a director. In a contract signed by Simon on 19 November 2003, they agreed to invest $5 million into Logo Logistics Limited not for a coup but for projects in ‘mining exploration … aviation (cargo and PAX), helicopter charter and commercial security in the following countries: Guinea Republic, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola’. In return for their largesse, the Lebanese consortium required a 50 per cent interest payment immediately on the realisation of the ‘totality of the projects’.
Two contracts dated 22 July 2003 had already come to light, drawn up between Severo Moto, who does not sign them, and ‘Captain F’ – Captain Simon Francis Mann’s regime-changing pseudonym – who does. The first contract makes provision for Simon and three other conspirators (to be named by him) to be paid $1 million. That was also how much Nick was in for – how much he said he’d been promised in his confession in Equat
orial Guinea. Six mercenary officers would get $50,000, and the ‘seventy-five’ foot-soldiers $25,000 each. His demands added up to more than $7 million. For both himself and his guns-for-hire, he insisted on immunity from prosecution and Equatoguinean citizenship. He also employed an old mercenary trick, and stipulated that the plotters would be responsible for providing Moto’s presidential guard – thereby controlling the person of the president himself.
I began to understand why Nick had asked Henri to go to the Scorpions – the people who would have prosecuted Nick if he was arrested in South Africa. With investments being made on such a massive scale, and with no idea of the location of the key Government players he was supposed to kill or capture, it was no wonder Nick had sought reassurance. He knew from Henri that the South African Intelligence services were aware of the operation, and possibly even involved in it: if they wanted him to back off, he would have done. His economic future on the island was set – coup or no coup. The only thing that could jeopardise it was a botched coup.
In the second contract to come to light, Captain F goes for gold. Marked ‘confidential’ – possibly hidden even from the other freebooters themselves – the formally typed wish-list demands $15 million within two months of Moto being installed. Other clauses and demands showed that Simon sought to control all of Equatorial Guinea’s security, intelligence and procurement requirements. Not only did he want to control the security forces, he wanted to make sure the plotters were the only ones allowed to profit from equipping them. As well as taking up diplomatic passports (as Nick had described to me in Conakry), the contract demanded the right for the conspirators to oversee the return of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars (minus a commission) that Obiang had squirrelled away in off-shore bank accounts.
Two other pieces of coup literature purported to shed further light on the plotters’ intentions. ‘Assisted Regime Change’, dated the same day as the Captain F contracts, examines how Equatorial Guinea might be run after the coup. The blueprint for the aftermath of the putsch recommended shutting down all international communications and enlisting journalists and businessmen as part of a concentrated campaign to ensure the new government was legitimised and recognised internationally as quickly as possible. In order to boost their credibility, the plotters intended to announce wide-ranging social and economic reforms, whilst ensuring that the foreign oil companies on whom they would rely for continued revenue were not alienated in any way.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 35