The Wonga Coup

by Adam Roberts

  Wild animals

  The men in Zimbabwe had one consolation: they were not in Equatorial Guinea. The Malabo trial began late in August 2004. A conference centre on the edge of the capital became the court, where du Toit and the others were kept handcuffed and in leg irons. Du Toit once called out: ‘We’ve been chained like wild animals … we’ve been tortured by police … we haven’t done anything wrong … [if we had] we would have tried to run away.’ Another group of Equatorial Guineans, including Severo Moto, were tried in absentia.

  A feeble effort was made to follow legal process. An envoy from South Africa said Equatorial Guinea was under intense scrutiny, and asked for a decent trial and no torture. Lucie Bourthoumieux, a French lawyer working for the Equatorial Guinean government, argued the process was fair as the accused faced a civilian court. They were seen as terrorists, she says, and could have been caged, thrown before a military court or not tried at all, as Americans treat their suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. But mistreatment elsewhere is no excuse for what happened in Malabo.

  There were obvious problems. Amnesty International reported on a ‘trial with too many flaws’. Lawyers saw their clients only three days before proceedings began. Du Toit later told a television journalist: ‘I’ve seen a defence lawyer only once, he was only allowed a 40-minute interview with all of us. He came to the jail, he spoke to us very briefly and then the next time we saw him was in court and he was not allowed to speak to anybody. He was not allowed to visit us. He was not allowed to come and speak to us, give us advice or whatever.’ The trial was in Spanish, with partial and often misleading interpretation. Only one of the presiding judges had practised law; two out of the three were Obiang’s relatives. Complaints of torture were ignored. One defendant identified a man in court, saying he had inflicted torture, but was told it was the wrong place to raise such concerns.

  The accused wore shorts, sandals and their irons. Du Toit, in a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, was kept apart from the others. At first he repeated his early confession of March, saying that none of the others were involved. Then as the trial began in earnest, at the end of August, two things happened. First, a text message circulated from a hitherto unknown group calling itself the ‘Military Committee for Liberation’ and addressed to ‘Comrades in the Armed Forces’. It accused Obiang’s brother, Armengol, of being part of the Wonga Coup and called the trial a ‘grisly farce’. Nobody knew who sent the message, but the government was startled by it. Mobile phones are known as useful tools against dictators. Popular uprisings in eastern Europe have been organised with cheap ones. This outburst startled officials who feared, as usual, another coup attempt, so the phone network was partly closed.

  Then something else happened. In South Africa Mark Thatcher was arrested in connection with the plot, causing huge media excitement. The trial in Malabo was immediately suspended. Prosecutors said they would interview Thatcher and, perhaps, seek his extradition. Some thought this an excuse to stop the trial and find the mysterious military group ‘inside the palace’ who were campaigning against Armengol. Somebody had faxed details of his involvement with du Toit’s business to journalists in London. There were cracks in the government.

  The trial in Malabo did not restart until November, by when much had changed. It became obvious that a media battle mattered as much as the legal ones in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea, Lebanon and Britain. Many incriminating details were leaked to the press, with journalists quick to publish any details they could. For the sake of the propaganda scrap, officials let du Toit speak to a BBC news crew in Black Beach in late September. He had grown thin and changed his story, again. He accepted a coup was planned, but claimed he was not deeply involved in it. He had earlier confessed, he said, because he believed the prosecutors were after Moto and the financiers of the plot but would let him go (and the others on the ground).

  Du Toit repeatedly changed his story. Early in October he signed another statement, three pages long. In this he elaborated on his first confessions given in English to Page, but denied others attributed to him. He talked of Kershaw and Tremain, and claimed that Thatcher had once ‘wanted to buy arms for somewhere in the Middle East, machine guns, rifles and quite a lot of ammunition’. He admitted a limited role in the plot. Page hoped to use this statement to prosecute alleged financiers of the coup in Britain. Du Toit admitted he had ‘reluctantly agreed to help Simon Mann and Greg [Wales]’ in a coup plot, but only because he was ‘short of work’. He claimed, implausibly, that he had no plans to be part of any military operation against Obiang. He also spelt out the goal of the Wonga Coup: ‘The whole thing is about money. Oil was the motivation behind the attempted coup. That is what I understood from Greg and Simon. As for the backers … the only other information I have of a factual nature is that one important backer was Ely, who I understood to be Lebanese.’

  On 12 October the defence lawyer in Malabo collapsed and died, apparently from malaria. It was a reminder of the miserable conditions in Malabo. The trial finally restarted on 16 November, when du Toit’s story changed yet again. He retracted all confessions, saying the death of the overweight German, Merz, had scared them into giving false testimony. ‘I had to tell these people what they wanted. It was the only way to stay alive,’ he claimed. But it was too late and du Toit’s contradictory claims lent him little credence. Nor was there ever a chance the court would acquit the plot leaders: little evidence was considered at the trial, where most time was spent reviewing the military background of the defendants.

  Sentencing came ten days later. To show justice at work, six men, including three locals, were acquitted. The freed foreigners were those with the least military experience: Mark Schmidt, Abel Augusto and Americo Ribeiro (the latter two had been arrested on the mainland bit of the country). They were released after eight months, two weeks and five days in Black Beach. The rest, including nine who were absent (Moto and company), were convicted and given terms as long as sixty-five years. The six hapless Armenians received sentences ranging from fourteen to twenty-four years. Two Equatorial Guineans were convicted of ‘reckless behaviour’, though they had not been charged with it, and received 16-month terms. Bones Boonzaier, Georges Allerson, Jose Domingos and Sergio Cardoso were told they would each spend seventeen years in jail. And would du Toit be executed? Despite Obiang’s early threats, the court dispensed with a firing squad. He got a 34-year term – effectively a life sentence. His wife Belinda, in court to hear the verdict, cried, ‘There’s not a place in my body that’s not aching … How can they keep him here for thirty-four years? … He won’t survive that, he’ll die. After another year … he’ll die.’

  Black Beach

  Playa Negra is a terrible place. Casual violence, the impunity of guards and the long history of brutal execution and torture give it an ominous atmosphere. Many Equatorial Guineans have spent time behind its walls and carry the scars of torture. Placido Mico, the most serious opposition leader still alive in Malabo, spent a year inside. He says his cell was a cupboard, 1 metre by 1.5 metres (3 feet by 4.5 feet). Some inmates were packed three to such a box. He was let out for ‘one or two minutes a day. The rest of the time we had to live with our urine and excrement and the cockroaches, flies, ants and spiders.’ Mico describes seeing and hearing other prisoners beaten with electric cables, as much as a hundred strokes at a time. He saw the sun twice in eleven months.

  It was normal for inmates to have wrists, arms and legs broken, without receiving medical care. Amnesty International estimates that 90 per cent of inmates held for a trial in 2002 suffered ‘inhumane practices’. Women were raped by officials. Health conditions were terrible: no mosquito nets, poor hygiene and a tropical climate conspired to spread the nastiest diseases. Amnesty calls jail terms there ‘slow, lingering death sentences’ and says prisoners all but starve. In December 2004 the prison cut rations from a daily cup of rice to a bread roll, sometimes two, per inmate per day. By February 2005, even that was irregular, wit
h sometimes six days passing without food. The government responded by attacking Amnesty as a ‘faceless organisation’ only interested in the fate of mercenaries.

  Again, those with money enjoy better treatment. Some rich inmates pay for visits by prostitutes. Some can walk around the prison at night. And deals can be struck with guards. Warders once took a group of Nigerian prisoners out for a night to steal cement from a construction site. One of the acquitted men, Mark Schmidt, told reporters there was even a prison shebeen, not the usual bar you find in jail. One evening he was ‘drinking a beer when one of the soldiers apologised [for the torture] … He said he was just following orders.’ ‘The men who beat us are our friends now,’ added Abel Augusto. Schmidt had been designated cook for the foreign inmates. He visited Malabo every few days to shop for food. Another released man, Americo Ribeiro, described leaving the others behind. ‘When I left them I was crying. We were all crying,’ he stammered. ‘We told them to be strong, keep on praying and we’ll see you soon.’

  23

  Thatcher Falls

  ‘I just feel in this particular case like a corpse that’s going down the Colorado River, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  Mark Thatcher to Vanity Fair magazine

  From late August 2004 onwards most media interest focused on just one man. For months after the arrests in March rumours circulated about Mark Thatcher. With hindsight, looking at his friends and business interests, it is baffling that nobody had confronted the former prime minister’s son earlier. He had been close to Mann since 1997 and to Morgan (whom he calls Nosher, but no longer considers a friend) for longer. He had funded Cogito, the early project of Morgan and Johann Smith in Equatorial Guinea. He had dined with Mann as late as February 2004, then called friends asking anxiously after his whereabouts. Both Crause Steyl and du Toit met Thatcher to discuss obtaining helicopters. Half the plotters had been with him that Christmas in Cape Town. Thatcher had visited Ely Calil’s home in London in 2003, in Mann’s company. He was known to have active business interests in odd corners of Africa and in oil. A keen entrepreneur, he was always looking for new ways to make money.

  Soon after the plot fell apart, in mid March, Crause Steyl was in London. He sent a cryptic message (in Afrikaans) to his brother Piet asking: ‘Has there been any mention in the South African press of the Thatch Roof?’ He followed up by saying: ‘Mark Thatcher owes me $250,000 and I have proof. His mummy’s people will give all we need, but now we cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ Crause Steyl would give the most direct evidence of Thatcher’s involvement. Yet it took five months, until Steyl fully co-operated with the South African authorities, for the big celebrity news element of the Wonga Coup to break.

  A more cautious man than Thatcher might have used that time to slip quietly out of sight. Neither Tremain nor Wales, for example, have dared set foot in South Africa since the plot collapsed. Morgan recalled asking Thatcher, soon after the March arrests, how much he really knew about the plot. He said he knew nothing. Yet he was in South Africa most of the time when Mann and the others were plotting their coup. He agreed to help fund a helicopter. He admitted later that he suspected it would be used for mercenary activity. In January 2004 he had sent $275,000 to Steyl. Mann referred to ‘Scratcher’ in his famous letter of 21 March. For some reason Mann also apparently wrote that ‘Scratcher’ still owed $200,000 as an investor in the project.

  If Thatcher had admitted some of this – as he eventually conceded in a plea bargain – Morgan says he would have dragged him to an airport and sent him out of the country to avoid arrest. A quicker thinker might have left of his own accord. There were chances to take a hint. There was the menacing phone call while he watched the Grand Prix in March 2004. Many knew he was connected to Mann. There were rumours that Crause Steyl, along with Kershaw and Morgan, were telling all to the South African authorities. Yet still Thatcher did not leave. He and his wife Diane decided to send their children back to the United States for school later in the year. There were rumours that his house was up for sale, along with his cars. But for now he lingered, ostrich-like, in Cape Town.

  Thatcher did go abroad in the middle of 2004, however, returning in mid August. On his arrival back in Cape Town an airport official said the police wanted to see him. Thatcher met his lawyer and friend, a genial man called Ron Wheeldon who wears round spectacles, flies jet planes and looks like a garden mole. When Wheeldon also asked if he had been involved in Mann’s escapade, he again said no. In that case, said Wheeldon, co-operate with the authorities. Thatcher called Morgan and asked him to arrange a meeting with the intelligence service: Thatcher would say what he knew in exchange for immunity from prosecution, as Kershaw had done. On 19 August, Thatcher and Morgan went to Pretoria, the capital, and saw an intelligence official. It is not clear what Thatcher admitted, but afterwards he believed everything was OK. Thatcher understood he had been accepted as a South African intelligence source. He called his friend Wheeldon to say that all was sorted out.

  But early the next Wednesday morning, a chilly 25 August, a special team of investigators – the Scorpions – pounded at Thatcher’s door, with journalists and television crews in tow. Thatcher was startled. He had volunteered to give information – and, reportedly, to show his house – to a government intelligence unit. But the Scorpions are isolated from other arms of officialdom. It became clear that Thatcher had no immunity at all. The Scorpions were part of the national prosecuting authority. High profile and mainly used to fight corruption, they are modelled on the FBI. Journalists often accompany them on dawn raids, travelling in a black and red car, with a mean-looking scorpion painted on the side. A team of young men and women wear black, sporty clothes. Some brandish guns, others have clipboards and clear plastic bags. They usually descend on a bemused suspect’s home while he is still in pyjamas, his breakfast half-eaten, then search his house. The Scorpions say they find evidence in the oddest places. At one Nigerian’s home in Johannesburg, for example, fake passports were buried in a garden compost heap. So a routine raid means pulling out every drawer, checking every cupboard, trawling through every computer and examining all phone records.

  Such was the raid on Thatcher’s large home in Cape Town. The Scorpions arrived at about 7 a.m. with the Cape Town press corps. They demanded entry from armed guards at the front gate. Thatcher, roused from his bed, agreed to let them in after he had shaved and dressed. Three cars pulled into the large driveway with roughly ten investigators. They searched the house and sealed computers, including those of Thatcher’s children. Many newspapers reported that the Scorpions stung just as the family was about to flee, with bags packed and waiting in the hall. Wheeldon denies it. ‘There are stairs up from the garage, where the Scorpions entered. Mark always kept travel trunks sitting there. The police saw these empty trunks and thought Mark was ready to go.’ Some newspapers also said Thatcher had a ‘secure room’, a sort of vault where he could retreat. That, at least, seems to be fantasy. There was an office, a set of garages and a bedroom known as the ‘Africa room’, where guests stayed. Beside that Thatcher had an office where a couple of assistants usually worked. His private office was connected to his master bedroom and, by a spiral staircase, to a dressing room (with a large collection of suits) and bathroom below.

  After some two hours, and while the Scorpions scuttled over all the house, Thatcher was taken away. Footage of his arrest was promptly broadcast all over the world. In arrogant Thatcher style he barked at the driver, ‘Come on, let’s move’, as if bossing his own chauffeur. The driver took care to linger so news crews could do their job. Thatcher was taken to a nearby police station in Wynburg, Cape Town. There are some reports that the former prime minister’s son was locked in a cell where hardened criminals stole his shoes. Though a delightful detail, it is probably false. Wheeldon calls it nonsense. ‘He was only in a passageway beside the cells, and that’s where I consulted with him.’ Thatcher otherwise sat in an office. ‘Everyone was nice and
humorous, there was no tense atmosphere.’ He was kept for five hours, until about 2 p.m. Wheeldon’s legal team negotiated Thatcher’s release on bail. The police wanted security of 5 million rand (roughly $800,000) but agreed on 2 million. The money came soon after ‘from England’, almost certainly from his mother, Baroness Thatcher. Thatcher junior was warned to report each day to his local police.

  Excitement among journalists was extreme. A day later the London Evening Standard published information from the bank account of Logo Logistics. It fingered J. H. Archer as a financier. Everyone assumed – despite denials by his solicitor – that this was the novelist Jeffrey Archer. The information ‘appeared to have emanated from either Penningtons or their clients’, stated a Guernsey court in April 2005; Penningtons denied that the firm, or its client, Obiang’s government, had leaked the information. The next day, 27 August, Equatorial Guinea said it wanted Thatcher arrested and brought to trial with du Toit. Whether or not that was a serious prospect, the idea of Thatcher dragged before a kangaroo court in west Africa to be tried as a coup plotter sent editors and reporters into a frenzy. (A South African cartoonist, Zapiro, made the sharpest comment, depicting George Bush Senior on the phone to a furious Baroness Thatcher advising, ‘Maggie, that son of yours can’t go around toppling governments just to get the oil contracts … unless he’s in office! Now my boy …’)

  All this kept Mark Thatcher at the centre of media attention. Every few days after his arrest a new detail, or allegation, was thrown out by the team working for Equatorial Guinea, keeping the story of the coup in the news. In November 2004, as the trial of du Toit and others restarted, authorities in Malabo confirmed they wanted Thatcher. The attorneygeneral, Jose Olo Obono, said they would seek his extradition for trial as a financier of the coup. The same month Equatorial Guinea accused Britain of backing the coup.