‘According to Simon’s statement, he went to see Tim Roman to get a back-up plane for the operation – in case there was a problem with the 727,’ I reminded him.
‘Ja, Simon told me he was struggling to get the aircraft for the coup, but that it was sorted in America. It must have been delayed, because it was only ready for the March operation. I was expecting it in February.’
I didn’t quite understand what Nick was telling me. I’d thought the Boeing 727 had been brought in because the February attempt had failed. Simon, I had assumed, hadn’t wanted to trust the goose-stricken Antonov again, and had made other arrangements instead.
‘The DC-3s were Simon’s plan. I didn’t know anything about it. The Antonov was supposed to collect the weapons and take them to Kolwezi.’
‘And in Kolwezi the men and weapons would have all transferred to the 727?’
‘Ja, that’s correct. I was expecting a 727, not DC-3s, though the Antonov could have taken them. It has a fourteen-ton load capacity. They would have flown on to Malabo, directly.’
The whole Kolwezi connection still didn’t make sense to me. It was a hard subject to broach with Nick. I suspected that whatever happened there had watered the seeds of the operation’s destruction. I took a deep breath, and ploughed on.
‘What exactly happened in Kolwezi, Nick? I find it incredibly confusing. Can we go through this step by step?’
‘Ja, sure.’
He stood up and edged around the coffee table, heading into the small, open-plan kitchen.
‘Simon told me that the runway in Kolwezi was long enough for a 727,’ he said, leaning against the counter, ‘but I wasn’t sure. I asked Gerhard Merz, who said it was too short.’
True to his Special Forces training, Nick did what any Recce commander would have done – he sent a reconnaissance team to check it out. For this crucial mission, Nick sent two of his best men: Simon Witherspoon (a former Special Forces operator who served first with 1 Recce and then Nick’s 5 Recce, before working as a mercenary for Executive Outcomes and then other military contractors on behalf of the US Government in West Africa); and Kashama Mazanga (a former 5 Recce operator and ex-EO soldier who understood the local Congolese language spoken in Kolwezi). They were joined by a third man: the mysterious Abu Baker.
‘They got to the airport, but did not physically measure the runway. Simon, Mazanga and Abu asked the people working at the airport if it was suitable for the Boeing.’
Nick stayed in contact with his team by satellite phone. Witherspoon and Mazanga both concluded that the runway was too short for a 727, and confirmed this to Nick.
‘So they were trying to establish whether the runway was long enough for a plane that wasn’t in fact going to be used?’
‘Ja, that’s right. There was a bit of miscommunication there.’
‘But Kolwezi was chosen specifically because of Abu?’
‘Ja, right again,’ he smiled. It was like trying to find the corners of a vast jigsaw puzzle. ‘We went there because of Abu, but the strip was chosen by Simon.’
‘Okay, but even if it was too short for a 727, it would have been okay for the DC-3s and the Antonov?’
‘Most probably, but I didn’t know anything about the DC-3s.’
‘And the second order of ammunition from ZDI, that was meant for Abu’s men – the PDD – at Kolwezi? They were supposed to hold the airport?’
‘Right.’
‘Ja, that was what was supposed to happen,’ Nick confirmed. ‘The people who were supposed to take over the airport security didn’t take over. It was going to be a peaceful operation – Abu had assured us that everyone was on-side. I don’t know if they even showed up or not. Mazanga knew that something was not right at the airport.’
The ‘hundreds’ of rebel fighters that Abu had promised had been nowhere to be seen. In the end, Witherspoon met only ten lightly armed men. Mazanga negotiated with them, and threatened to cancel the operation if the airport was not secured. Abu’s men retaliated by placing the unarmed Mazanga and Witherspoon under house arrest. Witherspoon, who wanted to withdraw immediately, called Nick and briefed him in Afrikaans.
‘I told them to leave,’ Nick concluded, ‘and they took the gap.’
Leaving, it turned out, was not that straightforward. With no transport of their own, Witherspoon and Mazanga eventually managed to give their captors the slip and persuaded a taxi to drive them back to safety in Zambia – a long overnight journey that involved negotiating several roadblocks.
I wanted to know who exactly the PDD were: it had never been possible to track them down anywhere other than in Nick’s filing cabinet. I told Nick that I’d seen Abu’s PDD contract for mining concessions and military assistance. Somehow Obiang’s prosecuting lawyer had managed to get hold of a copy, too.
‘It’s a made-up name. When I signed that contract with him, I said, “You’ve got to have a name or something for your organisation,” and he chose that. It was to make it sound more official.’
The PDD did not exist.
‘Who, exactly,’ I asked, ‘is Abu?’
According to Nick, Abu was a Congolese citizen who lived in Durban, the capital of KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa. His sister worked in the Congo embassy in Pretoria and organised their visas. Abu, Nick said, had made himself out to be a senior figure in western and central Congolese rebel groups who sought independence for Katanga province in southern Congo; he had also claimed to know a lot about mining – to be on good terms with Joseph Kabila, the Congolese president. It was a seemingly irreconcilable conflict of interest. None of the details made sense. In all likelihood, the ten men that Witherspoon met were planning to re-sell the ammunition promised by Nick to a third party.
‘Abu said that in Kolwezi there were stashes of gold that had been hoarded in different locations around the town. I agreed with him that I would fly it out, and take twenty per cent of the value as a commission. It was a bonus, really. Equatorial Guinea was the main thing. Kolwezi was secondary.’
The gold had allegedly been mined as the by-product of illegal uranium extraction – which, Abu claimed (plausibly), was being conducted there by North Koreans. It had been on this basis that Nick had gone to see the US defence attaché Colonel Clarence D. Smith in Pretoria. That could have been how Frank knew about the Congo operation. Abu was briefed about the Equatorial Guinea plot, too.
‘You know, the Scorpions claimed that Abu was deeply implicated in work for the National Intelligence Agency?’
Nick could not bring himself to accept that Abu, although probably a fabulist, was also an informer.
‘No, that’s not true. It doesn’t sound true. He met me openly, he never tried to hide. I don’t believe that’s true.’
Whatever the truth of Abu’s motivations – which were, I suspected, entirely self-serving – the consequences of his involvement remained clear: his participation meant that the first coup attempt on 19 February 2004 would inevitably fail. The only conceivable second chance the plot could have had was if Nick’s men had been billeted out of South Africa immediately. This might have stemmed the flood of intelligence leaks (which now became a roaring torrent) and damaged South Africa’s ability, finally, to move against them on Saturday 6 March. But there were no second chances. In the wake of the disaster at Kolwezi, the subsequent return to the Hotel 224 and the departure by 727 to Harare meant that Nigel Morgan and the other informants could not help but be successful in foiling the operation. Nick didn’t want to grasp the enormity of the cock-up in Katanga. It no longer mattered to him; he’d spent interminable months playing ‘what if?’, and his appetite for even more self-censure was understandably limited.
‘Why?’ I pressed him. ‘Why didn’t you quit after Kolwezi?’ Nick sighed, and then smiled at me.
‘It’s easy to blame me with hindsight. On-the-spot decisions are much more difficult. I tried to delay the whole process as long as possible. Simon wanted a follow-up after the first attempt within a w
eek, but I specifically told him that we should wait at least three months before a retry. He wouldn’t hear of it – maybe because he was under pressure from his financiers. I wanted to step out of it then, but the business prospects were getting better and he convinced me we had the support and approval of South Africa, the UK Government, the Spanish and the Americans.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I put that together with Henri’s feedback and decided to continue. James, the South African Government didn’t do anything after the first attempt. They already knew everything,’ he paused for a moment, and then echoed Simon’s own conclusion from jail. ‘I saw it as a signal that they really wanted us to go ahead.’
There was one, personal, question that I did need Nick to answer, though. In the weeks and months that passed after his arrest, I had, in one respect, felt a growing anger towards him. As the full scope of the disastrous operation became clearer, I resented at times the idea that he had ever wanted to involve me at all.
‘Honestly,’ I asked him, ‘after the operation moved from Conakry to South Africa, was it genuinely your intention that I should film the coup, as we discussed?’
‘Yes.’ He paused for a moment, unfocused, looking back in time. ‘Yes. Originally, it was planned for you to come in with the main force, but as things progressed I also thought it might be better to fly you in with the new guy. But the initial plan, definitely, was for you to join the attack force so you were there right from the beginning.’
It was unnerving to hear this alternative version of my fate resurrected from the depths of Black Beach.
‘I discussed it with Simon in South Africa, and then arranged for you to meet him in Paris. Simon thought it was a great idea, and that we must make sure you were kept up to date with the whole plan.’
‘But when I called you and asked for Simon’s number – you remember I lost it? – you told me you didn’t have it. Why did you do that?’
‘I didn’t want you to be in contact with him. James, the operation was not being planned properly. If it had been a proper operation, properly planned, then yes, sure, that would have been different. But it wasn’t. It shouldn’t have gone ahead. I did that to protect you.’
I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or appalled that he’d sought to protect me above the life of his brother-in-law.
‘I’ve always thought that it was my grandfather who, well, who saved me, really. Is that true? If he hadn’t died, would I have ended up in jail?’
Nick answered with a smile at first.
‘I look after my friends,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I’m not that big a cunt.’
We sat and looked at each other, wrapped in the warm air of the tiny house. Whatever plans he’d had for me, and however they may have gone wrong, I didn’t think he was a cunt at all. I’d made up my mind to take a risk. My anger, if that’s what it was, stemmed more, I suspected, from embarrassment than upset: I had long since accepted that I was jealous I had not been arrested, too.
‘Now then, Mr Brabazon,’ he piped up, separately emphasising the three syllables of my surname, ‘the ladies have left us some bacon and …’ – he opened the fridge door and rooted around – ‘… some eggs … and, ah, great man, some wors.’
‘Okay, brilliant. I’ll make some more tea and coffee. And …’ – I fished in my bag for the things I had brought him that day – ‘… I got you some cashews.’ I held up a bag of his favourite snack. ‘We can eat them while we watch this.’
I handed him a copy of our first Liberia film, A Journey With out Maps, which Nick had never seen.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I have watched Deku shoot the prisoner, or Kali Katigo from Kenema eviscerate the corpse of the man his comrades have just tortured to death. It was only the second time, seven and a half years later, that Nick had seen them in action. Thirty minutes of fighting interspersed with interviews and murder lit up the screen on the mezzanine landing upstairs. Marzaan joined us. I winced at the clumsy storytelling and rudimentary construction. Technically speaking, it is the worst film I’ve ever made. It is still the film of which I am most proud.
Watching it then, with Nick, had a strange effect. It was as if I’d been holding my breath for nearly six years. Liberia had moved on: the corrupt Transitional Government had been replaced by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s premiership. She was a truly democratically elected leader – and Africa’s first female president to boot. Although a deeply flawed Truth and Reconciliation Commission fudged an imperfect resolution of historical enmities, Charles Taylor, captured on the run in Nigeria, was at least facing trial for war crimes in The Hague. In post-conflict Liberia, LURD’s campaign against Taylor was mainly dismissed as being either murderous or, at best, merely self-serving – a verdict that denied the key role it played in ending Taylor’s dictatorship. Without men like Cobra, Deku, Dragon Master, and the rebels they commanded, there would have been no election for Sirleaf to contest.
Others had gone on trial, too. I stood as an expert witness for the prosecution for war crimes of Guus van Kouwenhoven – a Dutch citizen accused of smuggling arms to Taylor in exchange for logging rights. He was convicted in 2006 for violating the UN arms embargoes that my reporting with Nick had helped to provide the evidence for implementing – before being released on appeal in 2008.
Good as it was to watch Liberia move on, and participate in the application of international law, I’d never really let go of the story. All the while Nick was locked away, part of that experience was locked away with him, stuck in the past. Now that he was free, so – in a way I had not anticipated – was I.
‘That’s what your dad and I were up to all those years ago,’ I said to Marzaan as the credits rolled. ‘You were only nine years old then.’
‘It looked awful,’ she said. ‘I’m not letting my dad go away again.’
‘Ja, well. That was great.’ Nick spread his massive hands out across his skinny knees. ‘It was great to see it after all these years. Have you got any more?’
I handed Nick a stack of films I’d made since he’d been in jail. He shuffled the discs like oversized playing cards, examining their titles.
‘You know, when you were arrested, that was all I could think of.’ I nodded to the television, and the torture it had just revealed. ‘I couldn’t believe they’d bring you to trial. I thought they’d shoot you, all of you, out of hand.’
Marzaan looked down, her hand on her father’s arm.
‘What actually happened when you were arrested?’
‘Antonio Javier came to the house where we stayed at eight o’clock in the morning the day after Simon was arrested – the eighth.’
Javier was the government minister Nick was in business with. He took all the men’s passports for a ‘routine check’, and then sat and watched the rugby with the South Africans. An hour later, he took Nick to the police station – where he was arrested. There he met another one of his men, George Alerson. Nick urged Alerson to stick to their agreed stories, and then questioning began. Handcuffs were put on so tight that Nick said his hands swelled like balloons; he was slapped across the face and told that Simon had been arrested. Cardoso and Boonzaier were tortured together: hog-tied and suspended from a pole, they had guns to their heads and were electrocuted and beaten with rifle butts. Nick said that after they confessed what they knew, he made his television appearance, incorporating details in his confession prompted by his captors.
‘On the ninth, they took us to Black Beach. That’s when they put the leg-cuffs on. They didn’t have any proper shackles, so they used handcuffs. You know, they’re too small to go around the ankle, so they got a hammer and hammered them shut about two-thirds of the way down the shin.’
Nick ran a thumb over the spot on his leg where the skin had split down to the bone. He was heavily scarred.
‘We were kept separately. I was put on death row, in solitary confinement in a pitch-black cell. Man, it was horrible. There was no light at all – no windows, just a small hole in the ceiling fo
r air, covered by another roof.’
Only the cell door opening and closing let in any light at all. There was nothing to see, anyway: Nick slept on the bare stone floor of a five-by-seven cell. For the first five days they were not fed. Then they were force-fed by the guards. Eventually, food was left on the floor unseen in the darkness, where it was eaten and urinated on by the rats that ran freely around his cell. Typhoid outbreaks were common. Nick defecated where he lay, his hands cuffed behind his back, his legs joined at the ankle. He was unable to stand. Water was left in a plastic bottle with the lid screwed on. He opened it by gripping it with his teeth and thrashing around until it became loose.
The pain in his hands incapacitated him. His toenail was stamped off during daily bouts of questioning; his thumbnails split and fell off; he was kicked, punched and whipped; the wounds turned septic and his eyes were sealed shut by pus. At night the rats would try and feed from his wounds, and bit lumps out of the other prisoners.
‘They physically had to tear the shit out of my eyes,’ he remembered.
Eventually, he was scrubbed down, naked, in public. After two and a half weeks, he was given a dirty mattress to sleep on – though the guards couldn’t see the point. ‘You’re on death row,’ they told him.
Marzaan got up quietly to make tea.
‘Why didn’t they shoot you?’ I asked him.
‘It was a political decision,’ he thought. ‘It was only South African interest that saved us. I was very scared about being put in front of a firing squad.’
He was matter-of-fact about it, but the image of Nick blindfolded before a ragged line of soldiers had nearly been a reality. When Gerhard Merz died, Nick was told that the guards just shrugged their shoulders and laid his body out in the communal cell where the others were held. The threat of sudden death didn’t fade. Every week, for six weeks, he was subjected to mock executions.
‘Sometimes the guy was so drunk he would drop his pistol. Other guards had to hold him up. It could last for forty minutes. I just had to be calm, and polite. One mistake, and …’ He trailed off. ‘Ja. They kept me in that cell for eight weeks. My hands were tied behind my back for three or four months – until the trial. When they removed the handcuffs from my legs, they had to hammer them off with a chisel. The bones of my wrist were exposed from the chafing and the lock had rusted shut with blood and pus.’
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