Nick’s 2003 diary dropped intriguing clues to the build-up to disaster. Under ‘Goals for May’ – which Nick had been filling out when he first told me about the coup in Conakry, and invited me to film it – was the initial list of weapons he wanted: machine guns; AKs; RPGs; mortars; and 80,000 rounds of ammo. The total cost was a shade under $50,000.
Elsewhere in his diary, neatly written out in vertical tables, was a list of code words for the Equatorial Guinea operation. It ran over one and a half pages. The weapons were listed as spare parts for a mechanical digger; uniforms as ‘guards’ clothing’; Nick was to be known as ‘Diver’ and Simon as ‘Frank’ – derived from his middle name, Francis; the Boeing 727 was the ‘Truck’; pilots were to be referred to as ‘mechanics’ and the ‘Force Personnel’ as ‘Dredgers’. I turned the page, and scanned the continuing list. There, sandwiched between ‘Recce’ and ‘Entebbe Military Airport’, was my name: code word – ‘the Metallurgist’. It was the only time I had seen my name printed in black and white in plans for the coup drawn up by the plotters themselves. Now here I was, right in the middle of it. At first I laughed out loud at Nick’s choice. But he understood my profession perfectly. Metallurgists fabricate alloys – giving hard metals new properties, making them easier to manipulate.
The third and final fact was the most significant of all. It concerned details that were buried in another file – marked ‘Abu Baker’. Abu was Nick’s man in Katanga – the rebel leader who had failed to secure the airstrip at Kolwezi. On 15 May 2003, Abu (as head of national and international affairs for an organisation called the PDD: Peace, Development and Democracy) signed a contract with Nick. In the contract, the PDD granted Nick ‘the sole mandate to explore the minerals and manage the mines in the regions of Katanga Province’ in return for supplying ‘military and financial support’ to the PDD. Attached to it was another typed list of code words headed ‘Abu Kodes’ – to be used during planned military action in the Congo connected to the 19 February Kolwezi attempt at the coup. A detailed trawl of the Internet returned not a single mention of the PDD rebels: they were completely unknown.
The file also contained hand-drawn maps of Congo, Katanga and the town of Lubumbashi (famous for its uranium mine). They were marked with military installations, suggested lines of attack and mining concessions. The overall effect was more Boy’s Own than Special Forces: the handwriting (which was not Nick’s) was urgent, in underscored block capitals, and in a mixture of French and English. All that was missing was an X to mark the spot.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that Abu’s role was somehow pivotal.
In the back of Nick’s address book Abu’s name was written apart from all the other numbers, next to that of an American colonel called Smith – Clarence D. Smith, Jr – the US defence and air attaché in Pretoria. Abu’s connections and pretensions were impressive: the last code on the list, numbered thirteen, read ‘I have malaria’. Its meaning was printed next to it: ‘we took Kinshasa’. Nick wasn’t talking to me: he was shouting.
Although documents and meetings were shedding light onto the details of the plot, what I wanted more than anything was to talk to someone directly involved in the last days of the operation. Everyone in any position of power in the plotters’ hierarchy was either in jail or incognito – and likely to be there for a long time. Even if Simon did write back to me, he was hardly likely to give me the heads-up on Nick’s last-minute motivations – not least because I suspected that communication between them had all but broken down as D-Day approached. Only one man was in a position to help me – the man reputed to have taken over military planning of the coup after the February disaster, and who accompanied Simon to Harare to collect the guns.
Former Recce operator, Executive Outcomes mercenary and notorious hard man Harry Carlse had been acquitted in Zimbabwe and was said to be co-operating reluctantly with the Scorpions to help mitigate the sentence he expected to be served at home in return for breaking South African anti-mercenary laws. He agreed to meet me.
He wasn’t hard to find. In amongst the Tuesday morning coffee-drinkers and mums running shopping errands, Harry – a dark-haired ball of muscle – sat nursing a cup and saucer at a café in Menlyn shopping mall. Lourens ‘Louwtjie’ Horn, released from jail with him, was perched adjacent wearing a haunted expression that was immediately unnerving. We shook hands firmly, and sat down.
‘It’s good to meet you,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
He looked at me, as if hunting for clues of his own.
‘I was in the jungle with Nick in Liberia,’ I continued, in an effort to add a little credibility to the enquiries that we both knew were about to follow. ‘He invited me along on the operation. Lucky escape, I guess.’
Harry nodded. He appeared, in fact, to be the hardest man I had ever met. This, I thought, is who you’d been expecting two and a half years ago at that pool-side bar in Johannesburg.
‘What I’m trying to work out’, I asked, after ordering coffee, ‘is what Nick’s motivations were. Why didn’t he run as soon as you guys were arrested? He knew immediately, right? He spoke to one of the pilots on the phone. It doesn’t make sense to me.’
‘I don’t know why Nick didn’t leave,’ Harry replied.
His jaw, dark with stubble, worked around a thick Afrikaans accent. It would only be Harry talking. Horn, an ex-policeman, sat quietly next to him. Harry believed Nick was going to be connected to the guys in Zimbabwe – simply via his brother-in-law Errol Harris, who was on board.
‘I wasn’t happy about Errol being involved, either. That wasn’t my idea.’
‘I see. There seems to be some confusion about Nick’s final motivations. It seemed as if he might have tried to walk—’
Harry cut me off.
‘Nick was in.’ He spoke quietly. The way he looked at me suggested that he and Nick may not have always seen eye to eye, but he leaned in over the table and spoke precisely and carefully. ‘He was definitely in.’
‘So what was the plan, then? To land the 727 in Malabo?’
Harry shifted back into his seat.
‘Ag, I don’t want to get into the detail of this.’ He and Horn looked at each other. He seemed to be making his mind up about something. He relaxed, and turned back to me. ‘The plan was to insert into Malabo airport at 0200.’
‘On the morning of the eighth?’
‘Ja. Louwtjie and I devised the plan. It was a good plan. It would have worked.’
I was relieved that Nick hadn’t been involved in the planning of the Harare operation, and a tinge of guilt crept up on me for having assumed he’d been entirely responsible for the second attempt.
‘And what about Kolwezi and Abu?’ I quizzed Harry.
He shook his head and rocked back in his seat. He looked angry.
‘The Abu Baker story is bullshit. I won’t discuss Kolwezi. It was Nick’s plan.’
I nodded, and waited.
‘It was a fuck-up,’ he continued. ‘It should not have happened. The details of that will just get Nick into even worse trouble. The guys who went down to Kolwezi, to do the reconnaissance, they’re in prison in Zim.’
Under different circumstances, Harry and I might have rendezvoused on a beach on the island of Bioko, or on the steps of that 727. The operation could have been a bloodbath.
‘Okay.’ I accepted that there were some issues he just wouldn’t go into. ‘You know, I really appreciate you talking to me. It’s a delicate time – not many people are prepared to discuss it.’
Harry looked at Horn again and then pushed his empty cup away.
‘We want to tell the story and expose those to blame. And we want our legal fees paid.’
‘Those to blame for what, exactly?’
‘We were told we had specific, named, high-level support in South Africa. We knew we were compromised prior to take-off, and we want to get the people who trapped us.’
I wondered what ‘getting’ them might entail. Harry w
as someone with whom you clearly did not fuck.
‘I want to know what Johann Smit’s role was—’
‘He used to work with Nigel Morgan …’ I interrupted.
‘Nigel Morgan is an intelligence whore,’ he declared. ‘They sold us out.’
With that, he stood up and put out his hand. The meeting was over.
‘Harry,’ I asked, as they prepared to leave, ‘what do you think’s going to happen to Nick?’
He looked up at me, and grimaced.
‘He’s a dead man.’
The next day, Carla and I sat down in the café of the Sheraton Hotel in central Pretoria and waited for Billy Masetlha. Director-general of the NIA – the National Intelligence Agency – Masetlha was South Africa’s top spy; he was also national security adviser to President Thabo Mbeki. He was not a fan of interviews, still less of television appearances. He was a real-life African ‘M’, and we couldn’t believe that he had agreed to talk.
‘So where do you want me to sit, chief?’
Good-natured, and carefully spoken, ‘M’ ’s soft voice wrapped itself around the word ‘chief’ with a gentle irony that left no uncertainty as to who was in charge. We pulled up chairs, Carla started filming and we began to talk. Interviewing spies – especially chief spies – is a bizarre event: what you want to know, they either won’t or can’t tell you, and what they do tell you is significant not just for the content of what you’re being told, but by virtue of the fact that you’re being told at all. The man who sits at the president’s right hand does not open his mouth to the friend of a mercenary he’s just helped to have arrested without calculating each syllable with absolute precision.
The motivation for stopping the coup, Masetlha began, was borne out of a South African desire to serve the wider interests of the continent.
‘The people who were actually responsible for this current coup are non-Africans,’ he reminded me, after I’d asked how he’d felt about seeing so many of his countrymen arrested. ‘The question therefore arises, “What is Africa going to do about it?”’
To make those governments and those individuals responsible accountable for their actions, was what. No one, he believed, had a right to bring about regime change even in so-called tyrannical or oppressive regimes: aspiring leaders must be forced to go through democratic channels.
‘Mercenaries used as liberators? It’s a very interesting angle,’ he scoffed.
This, though, was precisely what Masetlha – and his comrades in the armed wing of the ANC – had manifestly failed to do themselves when they took up arms against the tyrannical apartheid government. Once you were in power, it seemed, it was okay to have one law for yourself, and another for everyone else thereafter – even if they were mercenaries.
So the backers of the plot were the true enemy. Nick, he maintained, was their victim: a willing victim, certainly, but a victim nonetheless. I thought of the stories that Nick had told me about the operations conducted against the men he called ‘terrorists’, men like Masetlha, whom almost everyone else called freedom fighters, and who had won – and more than once.
‘It’s reported,’ I said, ‘amongst the people involved, that shortly before undertaking this operation Simon Mann sought to reassure people by telling them that he firmly believed that he had backing from the South African Government.’
Masetlha’s glasses reflected my silhouette in the bright, plate-glass windows behind my back. It was like looking into a fairground mirror.
‘He’s lying,’ he insisted. ‘This Government took the decision to liaise information with the Zimbabweans months ahead. This Government took the decision to liaise information with the Equatorial-Guineans months ahead. We were involved with them throughout until we gave them the detail.’
So they knew well in advance – even though they had reportedly left it until the eleventh hour before informing the Zimbabwean authorities of the mercenaries’ imminent arrival. The question was how did they know? Masetlha believed that it was simply not plausible that Nick had made details of the plot available to the national prosecutor, and then slightly hedged his bets by stressing that no ‘formal meeting’ had taken place – which was, at least to the letter, correct.
Slowly, we edged towards what I wanted to know. I knew that Nick had asked Henri to arrange a meeting with the Scorpions. Had it been Nick’s desire for reassurance that had compromised the operation? ‘M’ could see what I was pointing at – but didn’t agree.
‘We have information independent of all these people you are talking about – your Scorpions, your NPAs, your Nick du Toits – all that. Independent – which still flows to this day, that information. Independent – same sources, same capacity, same ability, same penetration. To this day.’
He waited for the implications of what he was saying to settle before he continued.
‘Intelligence, not hard, prosecutory evidence, which we used to advise the governments concerned … We are certain, one hundred per cent certain, that that was the only source of information we had which we liaised with those governments that actually caused the arrest of these people … There was no information that was provided by Nick at all that was used.’
So according to Masetlha, Nick was off the hook as a grass, at least. I thought I’d push my luck a bit further.
‘It’s been rumoured in the South African and international media’, I continued, ‘that the National Intelligence Agency and the SASS comprehensively infiltrated the personnel involved in the operation. Is that something you can comment on?’
This, more than anything, was what Harry – along with all the other men arrested, I suspected – wanted to know: was it an insider who sold them out?
‘No, I can’t …’
We looked at each other, or rather, I looked at the silhouette of myself. Then he relented a little.
‘All I can say is that we knew for a while what was going to happen, when it would happen, who was involved, why. That’s the information we liaised with the governments concerned which resulted in the detention. … That information’, he reiterated, ‘was totally independent.’
There had, in fact, he said, been NIA agents among the men recruited – men who were still in jail, and who had been released; but, in the main, he was ‘relying on one independent source inside the operation’.
The only emotion I felt was relief. Nick may have warned the Scorpions in a last-minute bid to protect himself – but he hadn’t been responsible for the arrests of his men. The South Africans had known ‘for months’. Indeed, the plotters seemed to know that, too. Harry had said that they knew they were compromised – but had gone ahead, anyway.
The implication of Masetlha’s carefully worded answer about NIA infiltration was intriguing: only four men had so far been released from jail, and all of them from Zimbabwe. Two black foot-soldiers had been let go on medical grounds; Harry Carlse and Lourens Horn had both been acquitted – and were now, he claimed, helping with the prosecution against Mark Thatcher.
Masetlha seemed to be implying, though, that his main source of information had not been imprisoned at all. Simon’s point-man with the South African Intelligence services was Nigel Morgan – and unless Simon had been talking to anyone else connected to the South African Intelligence services or Government, it was looking increasingly like it was Morgan, the red-faced former British Intelligence officer, who was in the frame for the plotters’ downfall.
There was one other thing I wanted to know from Billy Masetlha: what would Equatorial Guinea’s neighbours have made of the putsch, had it succeeded?
‘I mean,’ I asked, ‘can you imagine a scenario in which the Angolans and Nigerians would just have sat there and watched it happen?’
‘Yes, they would do that.’
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
‘They would?’
‘Why not? Why not?’ he asked. ‘They would condemn it,’ he smiled, concluding with the same calculation that the plotters themselves had arr
ived at, ‘but you can’t reinstate a president who is dead.’
There was one more place that I was keen to visit. I’d always been intrigued by the Hotel 224 – the down-at-heel hotel where most of the men who’d been arrested in Zimbabwe had last tasted freedom in South Africa. I didn’t have far to go. Carla and I found it just around the corner from Masetlha’s office. Whoever had the idea to billet more than fifty of Africa’s hardest guns-for-hire for two weeks in a cheap hotel with a cheap bar minutes from the headquarters of the NIA must have been, it was fair to surmise, convinced of their immunity from prosecution.
We, too, were coming to the end of our time in Pretoria. In the month I’d spent trying to piece together the narrative of the coup plot, I’d managed to establish that Nick was deeply involved up to the end. I’d also seen for myself that he and Simon were part of a huge international network of conspirators, colleagues and contacts in Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, Guinea, Liberia, Spain, Britain and America. It was also clear that the plot had been comprehensively penetrated by South African Intelligence, who had ensured it could not succeed. Finally, the fantastical details of the Katanga operation had come to life in Nick’s study. Integral to the success of the plot, the hugely important figure of Abu Baker had also emerged slowly from the shadows.
What I had failed to do was unearth a single shred of evidence that could help Nick in jail. It was, I concluded, just not possible. His profound involvement was established beyond doubt. After key members of the operation gave lengthy legal statements in South Africa, there was nothing left to barter for his release.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 37