The Wonga Coup

by Adam Roberts

  Sunday Dawns

  At dawn on Sunday 7 March, the plotters were ready. After a long flight from the United States, via Sao Tome, the white Boeing 727 landed at Lanseria airport, near Pretoria. Its American registration, N4610, remained on the starboard side. Its chrome-rimmed engines glinted in the morning sun. From Lanseria it hopped the short distance to Wonderboom airport. There Niel Steyl and his assistants took charge, relieving the American crew.

  That Sunday an ex-soldier called Raymond Archer was sitting down for lunch with his girlfriend in Pretoria. He had returned the night before from a bodyguard job in Haiti, in the Caribbean. He took a call from Harry Carlse. ‘I’ve a job for you,’ said Carlse. ‘Leon Lotz has pulled out, we need you. You have two hours to get to the plane’. He gave no details but told Archer to go to Wonderboom airport. There would be a full explanation mid-air. Archer agreed and kissed his girlfriend goodbye. Lotz, witting or not, made a smart choice. Archer, the last recruit for the Wonga Coup, had just made a terrible one. ‘He was the unluckiest guy,’ concludes a relative of the Steyl brothers.

  Lourens Horn organised a bus to get the footsoldiers to Wonderboom airport. There James Kershaw counted everyone on, noted names and checked each person’s bank details. The plane was loaded with blue and black bags, each marked with the brand ‘Carry All’. One was stuffed with new lace-up boots still bearing labels. Another held sandals. There were sleeping bags, bull horns, bolt cutters, a sledgehammer with a green head, radios, a first aid kit and a satellite phone. They filed on board, sixty-four men scattered about the cabin seats. Kershaw stayed behind.

  At 4 p.m. the plane took off, heading due north. It barely had time to climb before landing again, this time in Polokwane, the dry town halfway to the Zimbabwean border. Everyone cleared emigration. It was a warm and sleepy afternoon, late on a Sunday and late in the summer. Back on board, the men settled down to doze, play cards or chat.

  In Zimbabwe, Mann finished lunch with Captain Mutize of ZDI. He confirmed his technical problems with planes were over. A Boeing would collect the weapons that evening. He returned to Cresta Lodge and checked the others were ready. At 6 p.m. he sent a message, the last of several, to a contact in South Africa. He confirmed that all was going to plan and he was in position.

  At 6.20 p.m. the Boeing lifted from the runway in Polokwane. It reached cruising height some twenty minutes later and crossed the wide Limpopo river, entering Zimbabwean airspace and speeding above the darkening farmland. A few stared from the plane’s port side windows as the sun slipped below the horizon.

  Niel Steyl, the pilot, radioed the air traffic control tower in Harare. A few days earlier permission had been obtained to land at the airport and proceed to its military zone. He says he called ahead to the airport, reporting a need to stop for fuel and to load cargo. In pilot’s parlance, he wanted a ‘technical stop’. He claims, too, he admitted to having sixtyeight passengers aboard, but none destined for Harare. ‘We landed, refuelled, parked in the military area. We were still in the international airport, but a different apron. We crossed no gates, we were still in no-man’s land. We waited two hours. I went to sleep in the cockpit.’ Zimbabwean officials recount another story, saying Niel Steyl did not report his passengers, who were concealed in the darkened cabin of the plane. Written instructions were circulated telling the men to keep still and silent after landing. Lights were to remain off. One air traffic controller, Faith Gutsire, says she was told there were only ‘three crew on board’.

  One of the men on board describes the arrival:

  We landed in Harare it was dark. All we knew was we’re going to DRC [Congo]. They told us we’re in Zimbabwe to get fuel and cargo. Some of us were asleep. Some were in economy class and could not hear. I was at the back, right at the back, back. They told us, ‘This is not our destination, we are here to refuel.’ There were no written instructions for everybody, just one piece of paper. The lights were on when we landed. Some of us were playing cards, some were drinking, some sleeping. We were three hours on the plane at Harare. We landed at 7 p.m. and stayed until 11 p.m. I was sleeping. Carlse and Loutjkie [Horn] came in and even Simon Mann came in with customs officials. I didn’t see him, but he walked in and came out. He said, ‘Everything is OK.’ Then Hendrik Hamman, the [co]pilot, says he’s coming back, he’s just having a coffee and he’d be back.

  Lourens Horn left Cresta Lodge, in Harare, and went with Mann and Carlse to the military part of the airport that Sunday evening. The 727 had already landed. Carlse spoke to some of the crew on the plane. An official ‘told Simon Mann he would inspect the plane as a standard procedure’, recalls Captain Mutize. Mann ‘tried to resist’ and offered a bribe, but Mutize assured him inspection was normal practice. Mutize says Mann first claimed there were only a couple of crew and cargo handlers aboard. Now the story changed. In fact, he said, there were over sixty men ‘whom he claimed were medics and logistics personnel’.

  Then Carlse, Horn and Mann were asked to inspect the weapons in crates atop pallets in a nearby hangar. Mutize continues: ‘While inspection went on, I took Simon Mann and his assistants to the parachute training hangar, where a truck loaded with the arms and ammunition was [parked].’ Horn recalls he and Carlse walked up to the crates in the hangar and looked at the weapons. The goods did not correspond to Mann’s order, they complained. An operative of the Central Intelligence Organisation – a man called Nhamo Mutasa – was filming from the shadows.

  17

  The Wonga Coup (Mark Two)

  ‘I woke with a barrel of a gun in my face.’

  Footsoldier

  Several thousand kilometres north of Zimbabwe, in the Canary Islands, the escort team was ready. From this launching point, Mann’s close friend Greg Wales would escort Severo Moto, the man who would be president, to Equatorial Guinea. They would be flown by Crause Steyl and another pilot, Alex Molteno. David Tremain, the British financier, and Karim Fallaha, the Lebanese investor, were coming along for the ride. This team would head south east, converging with Mann’s team as it flew north and west from Zimbabwe. If all went to plan, Moto would be brought into a secure Malabo airport roughly an hour after Mann had overseen Obiang’s removal.

  Moto’s entourage had been scattered between different hotels on Gran Canaria. Now they gathered at a small coastal airstrip, Club Aeroport. The Beechcraft King Air plane, registration ZSNBJ, was primed and ready. Crause Steyl’s aviation company had hired it three months earlier in South Africa on a ‘dry lease’, meaning he provided his own crew and maintenance. Finally it would be used. But, to Steyl’s dismay, the airstrip was busy.

  That Sunday afternoon, motorbike enthusiasts were using the runway as a racetrack. The event could not be stopped. Steyl and the others were to leave without drawing undue attention to themselves, so could only wait. To their mounting frustration, the bikers droned on for three more hours.

  Just before dusk the bikers cleared the strip. One of the men aboard the King Air plane says Molteno took the pilot position on the left of the cockpit while Steyl took the other seat. The cabin was small. At the front sat Tremain, facing sideways. Wales sat on the right, looking forward. At the back were four seats in a square. Moto took the furthest corner on the right side. He had a speech and an economic plan ready. The plan promised to get small things done fast, to show people a better life under the new president. Equatorial Guinea would be the ‘star of Africa’ and ‘a new model for the continent’. The new ‘state, discreetly but effectively present’ would promote economic growth, cut poverty and push ‘monetary orthodoxy’. It was stirring stuff. Opposite sat Karim Fallaha. On Moto’s left sat his closest assistant. ‘Sargoso was the main planner in the Moto group. He let Moto be as clean as possible, to play the part of Good King Wenceslas,’ says one aboard. A minister in Moto’s ‘government’, probably a man called Biyogo, took the last chair.

  According to one source on the plane, though no one else volunteered this, another aircraft shadowed the King Air that nigh
t: ‘There was also another plane on the way to Bamako and I suspect Tremain and Sargoso knew more about that one. It had more Spaniards and Moto’s people on board. Sargoso was liaising between the planes.’ The source adds obliquely that there were ‘Spanish guys, serious ones … [and] some serious American guys’ on the Canary Islands. This plotter implies that the second plane and the unamed ‘guys’ in fact represented American intelligence, and thus some sort of American approval for the plot.

  The take-off was thrilling. Alex Molteno took the controls, leaving Steyl in the co-pilot’s seat. He wore a golf hat and explained that he would take the plane low – ‘as low as you can go, over the wave tips and below radar for the first 120 miles’. The small aircraft lifted up from beach level, but just to the height of a single-storey house. The idea, explains a plotter, was to lie low beneath the radar screens of local air traffic controllers, allowing officials to say – honestly – there was no record of the plane’s departure. ‘Which is what the Spanish briefed us to do,’ he says. The small flying club is at sea level and they were soon skimming past boats and over a calm sea. The sun was low and the passengers looking from the windows had a view as if they were in a speed boat. They passed two or three cruise liners, glancing up at their funnels and windows. Everyone was briefed not to move. ‘If you need to go to the toilet, tough luck. If you need a drink, don’t get up, get someone to pass it to you.’

  Eventually, to save on fuel and once a safe distance had been reached, the pilot rose up again. Fly too long at a low level and the pilot risks losing a sense of proportion. Steyl explains: ‘The danger is you can’t judge height over water, there is no reference. A wave can be one centimetre or ten metres.’ But for ongoing security the plane’s radios were kept silent. There were rumours of a couple of F16 fighter jets in the Canaries, though no one expected them to be scrambled for a departing plane. There was a security lapse, says Steyl: ‘An asshole at the airport, a manager at the Club Aeroport, he phoned the bigger tower at the main airport. He told them a plane has just taken off with no flight plan and flying low.’ But by sunset the plane was heading towards mainland Africa, to the Moroccan coast and then to the western edge of the great Sahara. By the time the Atlantic had finally given way to desert, the night had set in. They flew 2000 km (1250 miles) to Mali. At this stage the pilots were relaxed, chatting about possible loot in Equatorial Guinea. Steyl had his heart set on some aircraft – ‘P51s, Mustangs’ – that were sitting somewhere in crates in Malabo. He heard there were three old planes: ‘We’d sell one and keep two. We were making plans for how to get them.’

  After four hours of flying they neared Bamako, capital of Mali. Steyl decided to pretend they were from a local airport. The plane dropped to 2200 metres (8000 feet) and the pilot announced they were completing a local flight from an airstrip with no tower. Steyl forgets where they claimed to be from – ‘I’m not sure where, maybe Timbuktu’ – but they landed and bought fuel. They spent an hour on the ground, anxious to make up time, reckoning they were some four hours behind the agreed schedule: ‘So now we confirm with Jo’burg that the coup is in progress. But also we don’t want to wait on the ground too long. This is a hot place. We try to establish the situation. [I] phone a mystery number for James Kershaw to ask what’s happening. I use a secret number that Simon gave me. I say, “James, we’ve landed. What’s next? Shall we go on?” Unfortunately James is not a military man, he’s an accountant. He appears calm but clueless. His reply is “Fuck, I don’t know, we have problems”’. Next Steyl contacted his brother Niel, the pilot of the plane in Harare. Niel sounded worried and explained he had no idea what was happening. ‘He asked if I knew where Simon was. He’d seen him earlier in the evening but he’d disappeared for hours.’

  Another man recalls that Sargoso stood alone at Bamako airport and used a satellite phone. He did not trust the others. The men stretched their legs by the runway and waited. A couple of Malian guards lingered nearby. Wales tried telling them jokes in French. Eventually he persuaded the soldiers, with a $100 bill, to slip back into the gloom. Then Sargoso called out. There were problems in Harare. Steyl got the same message from his brother in Harare: ‘Then, the very next minute, I got an SMS. He said: “We are all being arrested”.’

  In Harare the junior ZDI official, Mutize, was unaware of the sting. At first there had been no plan to arrest Mann and the rest. But word had come from South Africa, perhaps that same day. Zimbabwean officials later claimed they planned to detain Mann anyway as he lacked an end user certificate for the weapons. But that notion was cooked up after the event. Probably Mann could have collected his guns in February, no questions asked. But by March, a few weeks on, South Africa had shared the intelligence provided by Morgan and other sources. There lay the difference between possible success and utter failure.

  When officials demanded to look inside the 727, Mann admitted over sixty passengers were aboard and reportedly offered a $10,000 ‘gift’ if they looked away. They refused. Mutize took Mann, Carlse and Horn to the parachute hangar, where they opened the crates. ‘It was during the inspection that suddenly we were surrounded by armed men in civilian clothes,’ recalls Mutize. ‘I was confronted by the men who demanded to see the Government of Zimbabwe Authorisation Papers. I showed them the quotation and referred further questions to my superior, Colonel Tshinga Dube.’ At that moment plain clothes police and soldiers stormed into the hangar, ordering Mann and the others to stand still. The men were handcuffed and dragged away to vehicles parked outside the hangar. Mann, Horn and Carlse were promptly bundled into separate cars and driven away. Mutize, recognised as a worker for ZDI, was soon freed.

  Armed officials barged on to the plane. Niel Steyl says he, like most of the others on board, was asleep when they stormed in up the back entrance. Troops with AK-47s ran up the aisle, seized control and forced the passengers and crew off at gunpoint. Steyl was slow to catch on. ‘I thought maybe we would be taken to a hotel, I never thought I’d be arrested until we were outside and I was handcuffed to the flight engineer [Ken Pain]. Then I thought, OK, it’s a problem, maybe a couple of days.’ Kashama Mazanga was also asleep, in the passenger section. ‘When I looked up there was just a big barrel of a gun touching me and someone saying, “Don’t move.”’ He was startled and pushed out of the plane into the warm, dark air. ‘You just feel somebody grabbing you and throw you on the ground and cuff you with leg irons. From there to the truck.’ Ken Pain, the flight engineer, was in shock: ‘You just go cold … wonder what comes next …’

  Niel Steyl calls the arrest an ‘abduction’, though the plane was evidently in Zimbabwean territory. Another man did not believe what was happening: ‘I was one of the last to be arrested. I woke with a barrel of a gun in my face. I thought at first it was a joke. Some of the men were in military jackets on top of civilian clothes.’ It was unclear whether the officials were soldiers or police. He was told to stand while his hands were cuffed behind his back. The arresting men shouted, in English, ‘No funny jokes or we are going to shoot you.’ As the hired gun stumbled down from the American-registered plane, a bright light was flashed into his face. He saw almost nothing, but on the side of a police car he read the word Zimbabwe. The men were made to lie, face down, on the tarmac and then were bundled into two army trucks, thirty or so men in each.

  Jonathan Samukange, an urbane lawyer, arrived promptly. He says he was contacted by a lawyer in South Africa within a couple of hours of the plane landing in Zimbabwe, though the timing is suspicious. He was asked to act for Mann and the others. Investigators scrabbled over the Boeing 727. No weapons were on board, but they found military-related material in the Carry All bags and copies of various contracts – for the YKA mining company in Congo, and for the PANAC aviation group in Equatorial Guinea – that Mann hoped to use as a cover. They also found bags containing cash. One had some $30,000 in it to pay for aircraft expenses such as fuel and landing fees. Another, apparently Mann’s, contained nearly $100,000. They also found a m
ap of Malabo, with the pizza restaurant marked, the one du Toit had given to Harry Carlse.

  Last Chance in Malabo

  Late that evening du Toit was preparing to drive to the airport in Malabo when Crause Steyl phoned. ‘When I speak to him he says “I was just about to get my boys ready.” But I tell him there is something wrong in Harare. I suggest he should go somewhere else. I say, “I’d seriously consider going elsewhere.”’ Du Toit had the option, with two planes at the airport and a couple of fishing trawlers at his disposal, but he refused. ‘In his mind, he didn’t do anything wrong. In his legalistic way,’ suggests Steyl. Du Toit thought he knew the élite in Malabo well enough and explained, ‘It is not necessary to leave.’ In that, as with many other things, he was wrong.

  Du Toit probably heard the obvious advice from others, too: get out while you can. He was near the airport. Two men on the mainland could have crossed to Cameroon. But he chose to lie low instead, as he had done after the February coup attempt. Perhaps he did not realise how seriously the mission was broken this time. Those in Mali – Moto, Steyl, Wales and others – did not yet know the plot was over. They hoped it might be tried again a few days later. Even some in Harare, like Niel Steyl, thought they faced jail for a night or two at worst. And du Toit did not want to abandon his jealously guarded business, nor be caught while fleeing. Finally he might have hoped that his highly placed friends, notably the president’s brother Armengol, would offer protection. For whatever reasons, du Toit called his men and told them to go home to their beds.