It had also been impossible to unravel the role that Spain, Britain and America might have played in the operation – and exactly what the nature of Ely Calil’s involvement was, though Simon apparently thought him a principal player and conduit for funding. Similarly opaque was Nigel Morgan’s position: despite being accused by several sources of selling his friend Simon out to the South African authorities, he refused to go on the record and set the matter straight. The only thing about which Nigel was clear was that it was men – not weapons – that had caused the final, inescapable, problem. Even though Nick’s ZDI deal had almost certainly had been reported to the Zimbabwe Central Intelligence Organisation, it had not, after all, sounded the alarm: Nick had done too many deals there before, and Dube was too crooked, for the Katangese-rebel issue to raise suspicions. The Tuesday before the coup, the South Africans had sent a team to Malabo to brief Obiang’s people; the final call had then been made to Mugabe only after the mercenaries’ Boeing 727 had cleared South African airspace on the evening of 7 March.
As I sat in the bar of the Hotel 224, totting up the conclusions of our investigation, one curious fact posed more questions than all the others combined: despite all the leaks, compromises and betrayals, no attempt had been made to stop the operation on 19 February. But why not?
One explanation was that the people who wanted it stopped didn’t know it was happening on that date. With the men going via Zambia, and the weapons reaching them in Kolwezi, there might have been enough confusion and deniability to make sure they had the space to get airborne.
‘Even Masetlha’, I reminded Carla, ‘fudged his answer about the details of that first attempt.’
Whoever his sources were, though, it seemed unlikely that they would have been in the dark about the original schedule – the role that Katanga played in the coup, and the date they were due to fly, would have been known by many of the foot soldiers. Another possibility was that the Intelligence services had just screwed it up. Given the South African Secret Service’s reputation for bungling and ineptitude, that was all too plausible. The most likely reason, however, that no action was taken was because the weapons had not been collected in Harare. If, as Maseltha claimed, the South African Government had wanted to teach the meddling Westerners a lesson, there was no incentive to move against Simon until he physically had his hands on the guns.
Whatever the answer the entire plan revolved around one man: not Nick, not Simon – but Abu. Nick had thought he’d been dealing with a Katangese rebel leader: but there was a sting in the tail.
‘There’s something you need to know,’ I told Carla. ‘Before we met Masetlha, Nick’s wife told me that just after Nick was arrested, Abu telephoned her, trying to reach Nick. He said he could supply an alibi.’
She had put Abu in touch with a lawyer from the South African Special Forces League, who brokered a meeting between Abu and one of the Scorpions’ top investigators, Piet van der Merwe. The following day Abu went in to see van der Merwe – who was running the Mark Thatcher investigation – in his office in Pretoria.
‘So what happened to his testimony?’ Carla asked.
‘Well, it seems that, far from providing an alibi, Abu’s entire story was – and this is according to the Scorpions – “bullshit”.’
In one sense at least, Simon’s lawyer in Zimbabwe had been correct that Nick’s deal in Katanga had been the cause of everyone’s downfall. The moment at which Abu and his rebels became the lynchpin on which the operation turned was the moment that the coup was doomed to fail. The Kolwezi operation, and therefore the entire project, could never have succeeded. There were no rebels. The secretive Congolese, the Scorpions insisted, was working closely with the National Intelligence Agency.
After fleeing the Congo for South Africa, Abu, it turned out, had become an informer.
18
THE END
Before I headed home, I gave Nick’s wife a hastily handwritten letter to take to Nick for me. I penned it minutes before I left for my flight back to Europe. I was glad I had no time to dwell on it: words did not come easily. Nick was going on trial for his life; I was going to an awards ceremony in Amsterdam for the Liberia film I made with Tim and Jonathan. It was an uncomfortable position. None of the questions I wanted to ask could be written down; and even if I’d tried to write them, there would not have been – could not have been – a response. I wished him luck, and promised that, one day, we’d have another adventure together: there were, I told him, two roast chickens in the Petit Bateau hotel with our names on.
It had been agreed that Nick’s wife and Carla would make their way to Equatorial Guinea for the resumption of Nick’s trial without me. Almost everyone I asked specifically warned me not to travel to Malabo. In the end, it was Frank’s advice from US Intelligence that sealed it. Eighteen months earlier he’d urged me not to cross the bridge in Monrovia; he’d informed me of the death warrant issued against Tim and me – and now, on the phone in Pretoria, he told me, point-blank, that I should expect immediate arrest if I travelled to see Nick.
‘Those guys know who you are,’ he said.
* * *
Three weeks later on 26 November, at five forty-five in the afternoon, I called Nick’s wife in Equatorial Guinea from the lobby of my hotel in Amsterdam. The trial was over. Nick had been sentenced. He had avoided immediate execution, but instead had been given what Amnesty International described as ‘a slow death sentence’: thirty-four years in Black Beach prison.
‘I’m so sorry. I am really, really sorry,’ I whispered.
Nick’s wife was already crying. Her voice came in fits and starts as she tried to stop it from cracking.
‘How can they keep him here for thirty-four years? I need to get through this and I don’t know how.’ Thick sobs echoed down the line as she recounted the scene. ‘I wish you could have seen Nick’s face when he came out of court.’
As Nick had been led away, shackled hand and foot, he had been allowed to pause next to her just long enough for them to embrace. She told him that she loved him, and then he had been bundled into a black police car and driven to his cell.
I was completely unprepared for Nick’s life sentence. I had been clinging onto a misguided sense of optimism: white men, even mercenaries, were not shot by official firing squads in Africa, nor were they jailed for decades. Either they died trying to escape, or they got away with it – somehow. Perhaps that’s what Nick and Simon had thought, too – but they hadn’t calculated how fast Africa had moved on politically after their excursion into Sierra Leone.
‘I know …’ Now tears welled up in my eyes. ‘Okay, you just have to be really, really strong, that’s all, and you’ll get through it.’
In the months that passed from Nick’s sentence being handed down to my film being broadcast, the story of the coup slowly dropped out of the press. The antics of a group of European freebooters had taken up quite enough column inches and other, bigger stories screamed for attention.
The last hurrah in the media was raised over Mark Thatcher’s eventual punishment: a $450,000 fine and a five-year suspended sentence. He pleaded guilty to helping finance a helicopter he thought might be used for mercenary activity. Evidently, not everyone close to Thatcher had believed he would get away so lightly: the head of a London-based security firm confirmed to me that his company had been approached by a private source close to Lady Thatcher to get Mark out of South Africa after his arrest and before his trial – and bring him home to Mummy. The plan – which may never have been known about by, or discussed with, Lady Thatcher herself – was considered, role-played and then dropped for what were described as ‘ethical reasons’. Extracting Mark Thatcher from South Africa was illegal, and carried massive risk. The director of the security firm asked a contact at the Foreign Office what the ‘official’ position would be if the rescue went ahead. The verdict was straightforward: it would be ‘business suicide’ – the Government didn’t want to play ball, and the plan was scrapped.
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Simon was widely expected to be released after four years of his seven-year sentence, but in the meantime a wall of silence had descended around him. His lawyer, Jonathan Samukange, first told me that I should expect a reply to my letter soon – and then that Simon had decided not to reply after all. Dries Coetzee withdrew Simon’s letters from sale – they had, he informed me, been subpoenaed by the Scorpions – and the trickle of leaks that had enlivened early press coverage of the foiled coup dried up.
Other players in the saga fared rather better. In March 2005, Johann Smit – the freelance spook and erstwhile business partner of Nigel Morgan who had compiled the first damning intelligence report on Nick and Simon’s operation – was clearly one of Obiang’s favourite people. Smit was named by the Government of Equatorial Guinea as ‘Johann Smit, Hero of the Nation’ at an official ceremony in the capital, Malabo.
For Obiang, business was booming. So lucrative were the concessions that he sold off to foreign oil majors that he had saved up enough money to deposit half a billion dollars – in cash – into the family bank in Washington. It was a percentage of this money that Simon et al. were probably trying to siphon off with the second ‘Captain F’ contract. Unfortunately for Obiang, the bank in question – Riggs – fell foul of a US Senate investigation. Following the money led to some interesting discoveries: it turned out that Obiang’s lucre was in good company. Not only had the Saudi royal family, twenty US presidents and the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet been loyal customers – so was the CIA. In fact, several bank officials apparently had Agency security clearances. Riggs was fined a total of $41 million for breaking US secrecy and money-laundering laws, and effectively collapsed under the scandal.
According to the US Justice Department – investigating Riggs and the source of Obiang’s wealth – American oil companies were suspected of paying large bribes to the Equatorial Guinea regime, which was described as corrupt and regardless of human rights. Investigators found that Riggs failed to engage in ‘even the most cursory due diligence review of accounts’ held by Obiang’s government and that members of the ruling family regularly turned up at the bank in person with suitcases stuffed with $100 bills on a strict no-questions-asked basis. Marathon Oil, the second-largest American investor in the Equatoguinean oil industry after the Exxon Mobil Corporation, gave back half a dozen of its concessions. Obiang had no need to worry, though: the Chinese Government was falling over itself to befriend him, and within a year he would be photographed shaking hands with the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who welcomed the president as a ‘good friend’ after all.
Britain had certainly not been a good friend to Obiang. On 1 December 2004, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw retracted his earlier denials that the British Government had no foreknowledge of the coup. He admitted that ‘On 29 January this year the Foreign Office received an intelligence report of preparations for a possible coup in Equatorial Guinea … It was passed by another government to us on the normal condition that it not be passed on.’ Despite adding that ‘the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was firmly opposed to any unconstitutional action such as coups d’état’, the British Government had singularly failed to notify another sovereign nation (with whom it enjoyed normal diplomatic relations) of an imminent threat to its national security. Straw’s statement came forty-eight hours after Peter Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister and then European Union Trade Commissioner, denied being involved in discussions over the coup plot with Ely Calil – an acquaintance of his from whom he had rented a flat in London five years earlier.
Mandelson had been put on the spot after one of Nigel Morgan’s commercial intelligence reports – drawn up for an oil company, and quoted widely in the British press – claimed that Calil himself had told Nigel that he’d ‘recently met with Mandelson about the EG/Moto/Mann issue’, and that ‘Calil says that Mandelson assured him that he would get no problems from the British government side’, and invited Calil to come and see him again ‘if you need something done’. Calil refuted the claims; Mandelson repeatedly and vehemently denied having any such meeting of that nature, and no evidence of his alleged sympathies was forthcoming.
The vexatious question of who may or may not have supported the coup appeared to have been partly answered in December 2004, when the missing page of Simon’s jail confession surfaced, finally completing the full signed transcript. Simon said that ‘the Spanish Prime Minister has met Severo Moto three times. He has, I am told, informed Severo Moto that as soon as he is established in Equatorial Guinea, he will send 3000 Guardia Civile. I have been respectfully told that the Spanish government will support the return of Severo Moto immediately and strongly.’ He continued: ‘They will however deny that they were aware of any operation of this sort.’
The office of the Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, did deny the connection to Moto, but it was revealed locally in court that the Spanish Intelligence services had shadowed Moto on every step of his journey to the Canary Islands – and that nothing had been done to prevent his departure. The deployment of Spanish military assets was real enough, too. In January, the Spanish sent two warships carrying Marines into the Bight of Benin, which demanded to dock in Malabo – just in time, of course, for the first coup attempt on 19 February. They were refused. Undeterred, they requested permission to stage a military exercise in Equatorial Guinea’s waters. Again, they were denied access – in a move that Obiang called ‘provocative’.
In January 2005, the Spanish question was further illuminated by one of the plotters who lived in London. Greg Wales, an old acquaintance of Simon’s from the Executive Outcomes days, had been the plotters’ political adviser. During both coup attempts, he’d been in the Canary Islands with Severo Moto, preparing with mercenary pilot Crause Steyl to fly into Malabo with their man-who-would-be-king once Simon and Nick had done their job. Greg and I met in the subterranean bar of Fino’s Wine Cellar in Mayfair’s Mount Street. I found him seated at a table buried at the back of the bar. It was packed full of lunchtime drinkers, suffused with the pungent vapours of uncorked wine.
‘Good to see you,’ he murmured in the noisy cavern. ‘I expect you’ve been quite busy. Any news about Nick? I always thought his treatment was one of the more despicable aspects of this whole affair.’
He was middle-aged, smartly dressed in chinos and an expensive-looking burgundy sweater. I told him what I knew – which wasn’t a great deal. Black Beach was as unyielding as a bank vault.
Our conversation turned slowly to Spain. He maintained that ‘Moto had a large contingent and was always accompanied by one or two representatives from Aznar’s party, who were there with him in Gran Canaria’ in March. Although the Americans and the British knew about the operation, it was (he maintained) mostly a Spanish affair. He believed Simon was wrong to assume that Calil was the main backer. It was most likely that Spain was providing the funding through Calil. It was a hunch, though; he said he had no evidence to prove it. Greg thought that either Calil was using the money himself, and passing the remainder on to Simon, or that the Spanish were only giving Calil the cash in dribs and drabs – which, in turn, forced Simon, as he put it, ‘to go begging’. Although Greg’s hypothesis appeared substantially to corroborate the content of Simon’s letter from jail that Dries had shown me in the lawyer’s office in Pretoria, both Calil and the Spanish Government categorically denied involvement.
Furthermore, Greg did not think it was within Calil’s power to grant Simon any contractual concessions in Equatorial Guinea. The ‘Captain F’ documents (which he said he hadn’t seen personally) were, he believed, a wish-list concocted by Simon, and without agreement from Moto himself. As far as Greg was concerned, Simon was never ‘the main game’. His role was to escort Moto home, as a bodyguard – full stop; any action in Equatorial Guinea would have been the result of a local uprising. It was possible, he thought, that Simon had begun to run his own show, a show for which the script was allegedly neither known nor appro
ved by either Greg or Calil.
Greg also confirmed that one aspect of his role had been assiduously to lobby the United States Government, to garner their approval for regime change. This, in some form, he believed he had won. It wasn’t that the US backed them; he thought it was more a case of ‘We’ll hold your jacket while you hit them.’
He also ruminated on the logistical problems that Simon had getting the Boeing 727 out of America and over to South Africa so quickly. Simon had called on Greg to assist; in turn, Greg had called on an old acquaintance of his, a CIA contract pilot from Maryland. This pilot, who had started flying for the CIA in Air America over Laos at the tender age of nineteen, cleared the 727’s paperwork on the basis that the operation was sanctioned by the US. Had he not thought that, Greg maintained, he would not have participated. He then flew the Boeing on to South Africa (‘because he’s that kind of guy’), and then returned to the States. He was, it turned out, going to fly to Zimbabwe as well – but Simon’s South African pilot turned up in the nick of time. Greg flashed me a wry smile over his half-moon spectacles.
‘Yes,’ he chuckled, ‘it was very fortunate he didn’t fly to Harare.’
Robert Mugabe would have had a field day.
Greg and I said goodbye, promising to catch up again soon. He was a mischievous man – fond of riddles and of throwing diversions in the path of the legion of hacks who trampled into his underground liquid lounge – but his ‘CIA’ story intrigued me, and a couple of weeks later I called Ivan Pienaar, an aviation logistics expert whom Simon had engaged to help provide the aeroplanes used in both coup attempts.
It was Pienaar who arranged the DC-3s for the Kolwezi debacle, and Pienaar who helped organise the 727 for the March attempt. The DC-3s were physically provided by the South African company based at Wonderboom Airport – Dodson International Parts SA Limited – a subsidiary of Dodson Aviation in the United States, from whom Simon then purchased the 727 on 3 March. It was an amazing deal: Dodson supplied the Boeing 727-100 (or 2 CCB, to give it its US military designation) for $400,000, on a promise to buy it back after six months if the engines were undamaged. Simon had got himself a high-specification ex-US military jet airliner for less than the price of a new Bentley.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 38