The Wonga Coup

by Adam Roberts

  Freddie’s Coup: The 1973 Attempt

  Allan, his crew and the band of mercenaries sailed from Portugal on the Albatross loaded with fuel, military clothing and other material, heading for the Canary Islands. They planned to rendezvous with the Corsican ship loaded with arms before picking up fifty black African soldiers, probably veterans of the civil war in Nigeria, and sailing to Fernando Po. But Llambias’s report triggered a diplomatic response. Soon cyphers and telegrams were whizzing between British diplomats, who could not help seeing the funny side of the caper. They swapped notes about the dictatorship in west Africa, with one diplomat giggling his heartfelt ‘fangs’ for a message from a colleague. Another signed off an earnest letter marked ‘Confidential’ with a quotation from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner: ‘Why look’st thou so? – With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.’ The episode was a distraction from the daily tedium of diplomatic life.

  A cypher on 4 January, the day after Llambias sent his report, warned extravagantly:

  INFORMATION HAS BEEN VOLUNTEERED TO SPECIAL BRANCH HERE OF BRITISH REGISTERED QUOTE ALBATROSS UNQUOTE, A CONVERTED EX/NAVY MFV, TO THE EFFECT THAT BRITISH, CANADIAN AND FRENCH MERCENARIES AND UNSPECIFIED AFRICANS EQUIPPED (AT THE EXPENSE OF A QUOTE AFRICAN FINANCIER UNQUOTE BUT IN THE FULL KNOWLEDGE OF THE SPANISH AUTHORITIES) WITH SPANISH ARMY MAY ATTEMPT TO ASSUME CONTROL OVER FERNANDO PO SOMETIME AFTER 20 JAN

  The British Foreign Office finally concluded that Spain did not know of the planned coup. So the British warned Madrid, though made no effort to tell the awful government of Macias in Equatorial Guinea. British consuls in the Canary Islands, Cape Verde and elsewhere were told to look out for the Albatross. Late in January the 64-foot ex-naval craft finally arrived in Arrecife de Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. Spanish police (the islands remain a part of Spain) arrested the mercenaries on 23 January. Under interrogation they admitted the coup plot and the plan to ‘do away’ with Macias. They were deported. Allan and his crew were told to sail away: a Spanish naval craft escorted them to Casablanca in Morocco; a Moroccan naval ship escorted the Albatross out of its territorial waters; Spain refused it permission to return to its territory.

  The news eventually reached Equatorial Guinea. Another cypher, an internal Foreign Office document marked ‘Restricted’ and dated 30 January 1973, reported: ‘Radio Santa Isabel is announcing at regular intervals that the government has been informed that a ship carrying mercenaries and colonialists is on its way to invade Equatoral Guinea.’ Macias called a council of ministers and summoned diplomats. Barricades were thrown up in Malabo, especially around the presidential palace. Soldiers were out in force. By the end of the month demonstrations erupted outside embassies.

  The plot had been comprehensively foiled. But there remained one big question: who was behind it? Talk of an African financier led to nothing substantial. Alexander Ramsay Gay, who evidently organised much of the groundwork, was sent back to Britain, where he was again arrested and interrogated by British police. There, according to a writer on Equatorial Guinea, Randall Fegley, the police only released him after another Briton intervened on his behalf. This man, according to allegations in the Sunday Times, was both the brain and the main financier of the plot. His name: Frederick Forsyth, the well-known novelist.

  Frederick Forsyth, by 1973, was reasonably famous. He had reported for the BBC from Nigeria during that country’s civil war, then campaigned for the Biafran separatists. He had also made close contacts with mercenaries in that war. Subsequently he wrote a series of very popular novels, including The Day of the Jackal, about a plot to kill a French president, and The Odessa File. By the early 1970s he was passionate in his support of the deposed Biafran leader, Odumegwu Emeka Ojukwu, wealthy and well-connected in the mercenary world. After he spoke to the police and helped organise the release of Alexander Gay, Frederick Forsyth sat down and quickly wrote another bestselling novel, The Dogs of War. It was published a little more than a year later, in 1974, and proved a great success. It was soon made into a popular film starring Christopher Walken.

  Everybody assumed the book was a work of fiction. But, considering the documents obtained from the British National Archives, there is now every reason to believe it was based upon real life. The Dogs of War relates many true details of the real life coup attempt the year before, those described in Llambias’s report. It describes a plot against a country – ‘Zangaro’ – all but identical to Equatorial Guinea. A character much like Alexander Gay – ‘Cat Shannon’ – sets the whole thing up. Guns are bought from Spain through a German agent in Hamburg, then loaded on to a boat. Forsyth even describes a boat – a 74-ton ex-military craft called the Albatross, registered in Milford Haven (as was the real Albatross), hired in Spain and captained by a ‘Mr Allen’. Fuel is loaded in large barrels and RIBs are stored, along with webbing and various military clothing. Some goods are shipped from Britain, some transferred from Tangier in Morocco. A Spanish official approves the arms deal after bribes are paid; front companies transfer money. The boat sails with a group of white mercenaries who have recently fought in an African war. It then picks up some fifty black African veterans, and sails on for the coup. In the book, of course, there is one crucial difference: the coup succeeds.

  The official documents in the National Archives for the first time show that Forsyth’s bestselling story is based on fact. It is so detailed that one might reasonably assume that Forsyth had been involved. In 1978 a British newspaper, the Sunday Times, alleged just that. It claimed that the novelist, rich with his earnings from The Day of the Jackal, had financed and plotted a real coup attempt with Gay. The two men apparently planned the coup from Forsyth’s Camden flat, using maps, colour slides and a balsa wood model of the landing sites. Forsyth and Gay reportedly even composed a speech to be broadcast after the coup. The newspaper alleged he provided £50,000 for forty former soldiers from Nigeria to overthrow Macias. Another author suggests it was nearer £100,000. The newspaper said that Forsyth – who adopted the name ‘Mr Van Cleef’ – hoped to replace Macias with his close friend, the regional Biafran leader, Odumegwu Emeka Ojukwu. That made some sense as Equatorial Guinea, in 1973, was still home to thousands of Nigerian Igbo people from Biafra, skilled labourers who worked in the cocoa plantations. They would have backed Ojukwu as the new president. (Forsyth also used Ojukwu as a model for the leader to be imposed in Equatorial Guinea in his fictional tale). They hated Macias for his repressive rule, and for supporting Nigeria’s rulers during that country’s civil war. Eventually the Igbos were attacked and expelled from Equatorial Guinea, perhaps as an act of punishment, or to prevent others plotting a similar scheme.

  Ojukwu flatly denied being part of any coup attempt. Forsyth has long stayed quiet on the subject, but he agreed to be interviewed for this book. He admits he did careful research on how to do a coup in Equatorial Guinea in 1973, but only for the purposes of writing an authentic novel. He suggests Macias was an awful and paranoid dictator, ‘so evil, he reduced the place to a hellhole’. Asked if he plotted a coup for real, he first laughs and responds, ‘I am certain there was no coup attempt in 1973. But wild rumours circulate in this mercenary world.’ His research he admits, was unusually thorough. Over five months, just as the real coup plot was being prepared, he even masqueraded as a South African arms dealer and a coup plotter. He says he travelled to eastern Europe to a secret conference of crooks and arms dealers, where he talked of overthrowing a west African government. ‘It could be that the plan of the novel was presumed to be reality,’ he says coolly. At one point in Hamburg he believes his cover was blown and a hit man was sent to kill him. He escaped the town, by train.

  I originally postulated a question to myself: would it be possible for a group of paid and bought-for mercenaries to topple a republic? I thought, if the republic were weak enough and power concentrated in one tyrant, then, in theory, yes. I looked around and saw Fernando Po, and every story about the country was gruesome. I didn’t go there myself, but I met
businessmen and others who had been there, and they told me this place was weird. So I decided it could be done … If you stormed the palace – well, it wasn’t really a palace, it was the old Spanish colonial governor’s mansion – probably by sunrise you could take over, provided you have a substitute African president and announced it was an internal coup d’état.

  I began to explore the world of black market arms. Where do you get a shipload of black market weapons? I knew nothing about it, so I dug around. I discovered the capital was either Prague, where Omnipol, the Communist arms dealer was (but for that the client had to be cleared by Moscow), otherwise it was Hamburg. So off I went. I penetrated under subterfuge, using a South African name, and developed my theme. I attended conferences of black market freelance criminals. And I learned about the curious ‘end user certificates’ [to identify those who are entitled to use and buy weapons], how they were forged or purchased from corrupt African diplomats. One of those attending a conference brought a bodyguard with him, an Alan Murphy, who was a British mercenary. He kept a diary.

  Forsyth says Murphy, the mercenary bodyguard, believed his story about a coup in Equatorial Guinea and wrote it in his diary. Later Murphy shot himself and London police found the diary, which was passed to journalists at the Sunday Times. In turn, they claimed to have evidence of Forsyth’s involvement in a real coup attempt.

  Forsyth first suggested he is ‘certain there was no coup attempt in 1973’, though the British police knew different. They had the benefit of the Special Branch report from Gibraltar and the confessions of the mercenaries arrested in the Canary Islands. They also believed Forsyth had played a central role, according to Forsyth himself. The novelist admits that Scotland Yard contacted him, while he was living in Ireland, and told him never to try it again. Others are convinced, too. An ex-mercenary who fought with Mike Hoare and now lives in South Africa says he received a letter from a person close to Forsyth, Knowle Hamilton, who also confirmed that the novelist had arranged the real plot. Even readers of The Dogs of War might have suspected something: though an entertaining novel, much of the story reads like a documentary account.

  The evidence suggests Frederick Forsyth did plot a real coup in 1973, which sadly did not succeed. Somehow he lifted details from the real plot, as shown by the newly released documents in the National Archives. Forsyth might have claimed that he was told an insider’s account of the real coup plot by others and merely borrowed the information. But then why deny a real coup was ever planned? Perhaps because he also conducted extraordinary ‘research’ in the same year into carrying out that coup. That reasonably led others – like Murphy – to think he planned a coup for real. It seems that Murphy was right.

  Interviewed in April 2006, Forsyth now admits there was a ‘stillborn attempt’ at a coup. Asked whether he helped plot it, he says his memory is vague: ‘I don’t know whether I thought of it, or someone else.’ As for the relationship between the coup attempt and his novel, he is not sure which came first: ‘It was a chicken and egg situation. I’m not sure if the authors of the plot listened to me, or I listened to them … We were sitting around in pubs discussing it … people with a lot of beer in them.’

  He also knew Gay – ‘a level-headed Scot’ – from Biafra, and conceded that the two had co-operated. ‘Yes, we were talking, meeting in pubs, over Fernando Po’, he says. He admits, too, giving the police a character reference regarding Gay, after a bag with guns was traced to the Scot. And, finally, he admits passing money to the coup plotters: ‘Yes, payments were made, always cash.’ Though he suggests this was for ‘information’ only. Asked bluntly if he plotted a coup in Equatorial Guinea he laughed and suggested ‘you put in the book what you have found.’

  If Forsyth’s art imitated real life, it is also clear that life imitated his art. The men of the rent-a-coup mercenary adventures, soldiers like Denard and Hoare, were fond of his novel. They treated it as a useful guide, perhaps because it contained such convincing detail. Forsyth says: ‘Denard succeeded, Hoare failed, but in both cases it was remarkable. In Denard’s attack, I learned, every mercenary had a copy of Les Chiens de Guerre stuck in his back pocket and in Hoare’s attack they all had the English version, The Dogs of War.’ The plotters of the Wonga Coup in 2004 went a step further, apparently replicating Forsyth’s work in their own coup attempt. Forsyth believes the plotters of the ‘bizarre’ Wonga Coup followed his book extremely closely.

  It was almost the same, blow by blow, as my novel! There was one important difference. I said it cannot be done by airplane. A ship can drop over the horizon and be entirely on its own. There you can do your training; on board, you can oil and grease – or degrease, rather – your guns. You can use inflatable boats for dummy runs. Then you would come ashore in RIBs. In my book Cat Shannon, the chief mercenary, had a back-up unit of forty black soldiers.

  Then thirty years pass and suddenly I hear of this bizarre plan in Equatorial Guinea! I’ve never spoken to Simon Mann. But here were the elements of my novel: the British backer; there is Severo Moto in exile; an external financier; the lure of [mineral] wealth; funding through blind companies; the recruitment of an officer to run it all. Then it was a complete cock-up, too much chat in bars in South Africa, the intelligence soon knew all about it. Yes, it was all taken off the page!

  What is remarkable about this episode – apart from the fact that a prominent British figure was apparently involved in plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea, which sadly failed – is that his exploits were repeated precisely three decades later by another British figure, Simon Mann. But where the plotters of the real life first attack had a noble goal – removing a deranged dictator from power – Mann’s scheme was organised for a more predictable reward. Where the old Equatorial Guinea was repressive and poor, the modern one is both repressive and rich – a far more appealing target for a hired gun.

  4

  Obiang in Charge

  ‘… the Fernando Po people say …[a] ladder reached from earth to heaven so the gods could go up and down it and attend personally to mundane affairs…[But they] threw down the ladder, and have since left humanity severely alone.’

  Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1897)

  The consequences of the coup’s failure in 1973 were not too grave for the plotters. Forsyth profited from The Dogs of War; the hired guns avoided jail. But Macias stayed in power for six more years, growing ever more awful. His behaviour also grew increasingly odd. As if performing Shakespeare, he held long conversations with people he had killed, ordering that places be set at dinner for ghosts of particular victims. By 1979, even close family members feared for their lives. He dreaded assassination himself. He was part deaf (which helps explain why he shouted and screamed during speeches), half blind and suffered ‘jerky movements’, suggesting a serious illness. He could only rule with the support of his immediate family, notably his nephew Obiang Nguema, the commander of the National Guard and the military governor of Fernando Po.

  Macias eventually retreated to a fortified villa in his remote home town of Mongomo, on the mainland. When the army stopped receiving wages, a group of officers of the National Guard visited and asked for money. Macias had them summarily shot. Finally that spurred others to act: the tyrant was removed in a putsch on 3 August 1979, without the help of foreign novelists. Obiang and a group of other senior officers called it a ‘freedom coup’. Macias retired with suitcases packed with green banknotes – equeles – bearing his own likeness to his stronghold in Mongomo, where he stuffed the loot in a wooden hut. The exact amount is unknown but estimates vary from $60 million to $150 million. He hunkered down in a bamboo bunker, defended by loyal fighters, with dozens of villagers as hostages.

  As soldiers loyal to the new government approached, Macias killed several hostages and a large battle erupted. The hut full of money was set ablaze, destroying the country’s entire foreign reserves. A Romanian engineer who hid under a table in a house in Mongomo while fighting raged guessed that hundr
eds were killed. Eventually Macias fled to the jungle. Racing to the Gabonese border, his car fell into an ambush and the driver was killed. Cornered in thick forest, most of his fighters deserted. A government soldier bragged that Macias was now ‘on foot and alone: we shall get him’. Eventually a peasant woman spotted the old dictator clambering out of a roadside ditch, still clutching a small suitcase. He screamed at her: ‘You will come under my black magic powers. I don’t know why you want to hunt me when I have given you all my money.’ An army statement said just one loyal guard stayed with Macias to the end, though he was finally killed. A bullet caught Macias, too, in the left arm, but he was detained alive.

  News of the arrest produced ‘wild scenes of joy in Malabo’, reported Spanish radio. Ordinary people called the old dictator Hitler. He had all but destroyed Equatorial Guinea. A Reuters journalist who visited shortly afterwards wrote that the ‘jungle creeps into cocoa plantations … The jobless wander about aimlessly and rats dash across hospital wards. Most people live on wild fruit and vegetables, and a packet of cigarettes costs a week’s average salary.’

  A new regime

  But it was not the start of democracy for the country. Macias’s nephew and longstanding acolyte, Obiang Nguema, took over as head of a new ‘Supreme Military Council’. He anguished over what to do with the old tyrant. His uncle was an important relative, a near father figure, according to custom in this part of Africa. More troubling, Obiang had long supported him. A trial might expose evidence of his own complicity in Macias’s misrule, so the nephew wanted to leave his uncle to rot in a psychiatric hospital. But the public demanded prosecution and execution.