My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

The following day Simon Mann was officially named as one of the Zimbabwe detainees – arrested at Harare airport with two other men as he met a Boeing 727 jet airliner carrying the sixty-four mercenaries and three crew. Simon Witherspoon, a white South African former soldier (and erstwhile member of Executive Outcomes), was identified as the spokesman for the men on the plane. Meanwhile, Nick had been named as the leader of the contingent seized in Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea. It wasn’t looking good.

  I tried Frank again, and finally managed to get through. He was in West Africa and professed ignorance of the operation – claiming to be as much in the dark as everyone else.

  ‘Frank,’ I pressed him, ‘you are a senior Intelligence field officer. Are you seriously telling me that the first you heard of this was when Simon was arrested?’

  He insisted that was the case. Frank asked me what I knew, but I was cautious again – and pleaded ignorance of any foreknowledge. I had no idea where a report of my conversation with Frank might ultimately end up. At that crucial stage, any seemingly harmless scrap of information had the power to implicate Nick in treason – in a country renowned for its predilection for torture and execution.

  ‘Do you have any information about the guys arrested in Zim?’ I followed up.

  It turned out that Frank had a personal interest in the story: several of the men arrested with Simon were friends of his, and at various times in the past had been employed ‘on legitimate US Government business’. His network of South African guns-for-hire had quickly furnished him with some of the names of the other men picked up.

  Simon Witherspoon, and another South African soldier, called Raymond Archer, had been hired in West Africa a year after the same operation to evacuate the anti-Taylor rebels from the US embassy in Monrovia in 1998 that Cobus had told me about when we first discussed the Liberia film. Several of the other white men detained in Harare – including Louis du Preez – had also worked on behalf of the Americans; all of them had been employed by Executive Outcomes, and, Frank pointed out, most of them had been in the Recces with Nick.

  As well as these past US Army connections, there was another American military link to the mercenaries arrested in Zimbabwe: the Boeing 727 that flew them there from South Africa was registered in the US and until recently had been used by the American 201 Airlift Squadron of the National Guard. It had only been sold by the Government to the company that supplied it to Simon in 2002. Frank thought that was an amusing coincidence – and believed that following the aircraft’s history might be enlightening.

  What certainly wasn’t a coincidence was that of the sixty-four soldiers arrested on the plane in Zimbabwe, many had formerly served with 32 ‘Buffalo’ Battalion, the so-called ‘Terrible Ones’ who had provided the bulk of Executive Outcomes’ fighting men. Diplomatic sources were claiming that twenty were South Africans, eighteen were Namibians, twenty-three were Angolans, one was a Zimbabwean travelling on a South African passport, and that there were also two men from the Democratic Republic of Congo present. It sounded like an EO old-school reunion.

  ‘Frank,’ I asked, before we hung up, ‘if the reports are correct, and Nick had tried to topple Obiang in Equatorial Guinea, how far do you think he’d have got?’

  Frank laughed.

  ‘What you have to ask yourself, James, is how could he have been stopped? Obiang has no anti-aircraft artillery, and most of their army is drunk and untrained. Nick and his guys could have rolled that bunch of momos up with their eyes closed.’

  That evening Nick appeared in my living room. On television news reports he looked strangely young: clean-shaven, and wearing a dark green shirt, he showed no obvious signs of mistreatment. His hair was wet and matted, and sweat gleamed on his face. The only similarity between what he’d planned and what had subsequently happened was that he’d ended up starring in a propaganda broadcast after all.

  He was talking to an unseen interviewer from the Equatoguinean Government. He claimed to be talking freely, and that he had not been tortured. I wanted to see him clearly, for him to turn and look me in the eye – Then I’ll know if you’re lying, I thought. What he said next shocked me.

  ‘Half an hour after the people landed with the force from South Africa,’ Nick explained in clear, precise English, ‘they will fly in Severo Moto and a new government from Spain.’

  Moto was an Equatoguinean political exile. He was supposed to land in Malabo airport under the cover of darkness.

  ‘They will land here and then he will be here on the ground, then he can take over the government,’ he re-affirmed. He seemed unflustered – relaxed, even – as he implicated Simon and the other men arrested in Harare.

  Oh, mate, I thought, what have you done? It was impossible to imagine Nick selling anyone out, or cracking under pressure. Perhaps they’ve threatened to shoot him, I reasoned, or perhaps he’s cut a deal with them?

  Other news coverage showed photos of Simon Mann as a schoolboy at Eton and, bizarrely, playing the role of British Army colonel Derek Wilford in Paul Greengrass’s drama-documentary Bloody Sunday – looking, one commentator remarked, not unlike Richard Burton’s character in The Wild Geese.

  It was hard to reconcile the image of the two professional soldiers I’d had dinner with in Paris with the men now under arrest: their confidence in victory had been unfounded, and the plot was unravelling faster than anyone could keep up with. The excitement they’d shown over their African Adventure had ended up as a public-relations bonanza for two despicable regimes – spokesmen for whom were now busily, and not implausibly, ranting about taking revenge on ‘colonial powers’, ‘MI6’ and ‘the CIA’ for meddling in Africa’s business. While Nick faced a trial for treason in West Africa, Simon and the others were similarly threatened with the death penalty by Zimbabwe’s foreign minister. Even South Africa’s Department of Foreign Affairs seemed to be jumping on the anti-mercenary bandwagon, emphasising that if the men on board the ill-fated 727 did turn out to be ‘dogs of war’, then they would be abandoned to the justice of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.

  In fact, a lot of people had been abandoned by Nick and Simon’s big Adventure. As well as Nick’s wife, and his cherished eleven-year-old daughter, there were the families of more than eighty-five men who now faced either capital charges or a lengthy stretch in prison. Alongside one of the greatest news stories of the decade was unfolding a series of painful, personal tragedies. The reality of my conspiratorial confidences with Nick was beginning to hit home.

  ‘I managed to talk to him by phone,’ Nick’s wife told me, strangely sanguine when I called after the broadcast.

  His captors had allowed him to make a closely monitored call to her in order to ask for information about the coup from the files in his office. It was clear that she now knew why he was in Equatorial Guinea, and had access to details about the operation. Nonetheless, hope and expectation lifted the timbre of her voice.

  ‘He assured me he’s okay, really.’

  It sounded as if she was trying to convince herself. Either Nick’s role was not what it seemed, or he was lying to protect his wife.

  ‘Perhaps he’ll be back soon, James. We must pray, anyway.’

  But Nick wasn’t coming home any time soon. Along with fifteen other men who’d been arrested with him, he was heading for Equatorial Guinea’s notorious Black Beach prison – a crumbling, Spanish colonial-era penitentiary on the main island of Bioko. Renowned as Africa’s worst jail, it was more reminiscent of Devil’s Island in Papillon than of a modern penal institution. The prisoners temporarily vanished into a labyrinth of violence.

  It wasn’t long, though, before one of the South Africans managed to smuggle out an account of their mistreatment, scribbled onto the back of a cigarette packet. Dated 10 and 11 March, and later quoted in a damning Amnesty International report, it read:

  10/3 22h00–23h00 I was taken to the police station for interrogation. I had no lawyer. I was asked many questions. I had no answers for them. />
  Handcuffs tightened and cut into my flesh, into bone of right hand.

  I was beaten with the fist. I had no answers … Beaten on head and jaw.

  They took me to a small dark room down the stairs into the police courtyard. Here I was put on the ground. A dim light was burning. I saw Sérgio Cardoso hanging, face down, in the air with a pole through his arms and legs. The police guard started asking questions which I still could not answer. Every question a guard would stand on my shin bone, grinding off the skin and flesh of the right leg with the military boots. This carried on for at least 30 minutes. I was shouting, begging them to stop.

  Later I begged them rather shoot me for I could not take the pain and agony any more … After no answers it stopped. I was taken back at 2 o’clock.

  11/3 about 15h00 I was tied to a bed with cuffs on my right hand. I was beaten and slapped … my right thumb broke.

  At my bed … I was beaten with a blow unconscious.

  The same afternoon I was burnt with a lighter.

  At 17h00 I was taken to the police station and told to write everything I knew. Anything that came to my mind. I will have the same and worse treatment of the previous evening. I was terrified and wrote down as if I was involved in everything (which I was not) because they were to torture me again.

  Cardoso, while hanging from the pole, was electrocuted and then subjected to mock executions. Many of the men had the soles of their feet burned with lighters. All of them were painfully shackled hand and foot, beaten with rifle butts and told they would be killed.

  As well as Cardoso, several of the other fifteen men arrested with Nick had South African military backgrounds – and some had previous form. José Passocas Domingos (known as J.P.) had served with 5 and then 4 Recce, while Marius Boonzaier (known as ‘Bones’) had been in 1 Recce, before moving on to work in Special Forces intelligence. George Alerson had started off in 32 Battalion, before passing selection for 5 Reconnaissance, where he served with Nick. He’d already served a lengthy jail term in Mozambique for his part in an aborted assassination attempt on Albie Sachs, an anti-apartheid legal activist who was later appointed as a judge by Nelson Mandela. Eventually blown up by a car bomb in Maputo in 1988 by agents from the Civil Cooperation Bureau, Sachs lost an arm, and the sight in one eye.

  Gerhard Merz, a German aviation specialist whom Nick had hired through Simon, was altogether a different character: the manager of an aviation company called Central Asian Logistics, he had set up Nick’s air operations in Equatorial Guinea. Even by the standards of the mercenary company Nick kept in Malabo, Merz had a particularly dangerous past. The United States Government claimed he had brokered the sale of materials for making chemical weapons between China and Iran from 1991 to 1993; in 1994, Bill Clinton put the presidential signature to an Executive Order denouncing Merz for promoting ‘the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons’. Nick had certainly collected a motley crew of fellow African Adventurers.

  On 17 March, Merz was tortured to death. Left in front of the other captured men, his body was covered in bruises; his back and feet burned by cigarette lighters. The Equatoguinean authorities claimed he’d died of cerebral malaria; Amnesty International disagreed. Nick’s other colleagues narrowly survived their interrogations in what Sérgio Cardoso – Nick’s right-hand man and former soldier in 32 Battalion – described as a dark, blood-spattered ‘torture room’.

  Nick himself was kept separate from the other prisoners – tied up in pitch-black solitary confinement. The future of all the detainees there looked bleak. A week after his arrest, President Obiang – the former governor of Black Beach prison – denounced Nick and his cohort as ‘devils’, promising ‘the terrorists’ ‘a fair trial’, with the caveat that ‘if they have to be killed, they will be killed. Equatorial Guinea has not abolished the death penalty, we won’t forgive them.’

  The seventy men, including Simon Mann, held in Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi maximum security prison also feared for their lives. Ironically, the jail itself had been built by the former white minority Rhodesian Government – a regime previously enthusiastically supported by several of the guns-for-hire who had now ended up behind its walls. Originally built to house 900 inmates, by March 2004 it accommodated more than 3,000 men. One of the mercenaries died of meningitis, and two others were later released on medical grounds. Smuggled out of jail, horrific stories of their confinement painted a grim picture of abuse.

  Homosexual intercourse was openly practised by many of the local Zimbabwean prisoners; younger men were raped in return for the ‘protection’ of older inmates. It was estimated that more than half of the prison population was infected with HIV. Raw sewage piled up in the cells; there was no running water; and the guards savagely beat the detainees with batons. Both the black and white recruits who were brought on board as foot-soldiers for the coup lived in conditions described by one former soldier as being like a ‘concentration camp’. Other prisoners died in the overcrowded cells almost every day.

  Chained to the bed where he slept, Simon Mann was eventually kept separate from the other men arrested with him – because one of the other white mercenaries, Louis du Preez, threatened to attack him.

  As news of the men’s condition leaked out to the press, Nick’s wife became increasingly agitated. Not only was Nick being held on death row by a despotic government openly seeking his execution, the situation in Zimbabwe, too, contained the seeds of another tragedy for her.

  ‘You see, James,’ she explained in one of our, by now, almost daily conversations, ‘there’s something else, something really bad, that I have to tell you.’

  I tried, and failed, to imagine the scale of the horror she was about to impart.

  ‘It’s my brother, Errol,’ she continued. ‘He was on the plane, too. He’s in jail with Simon in Chikurubi. He’s being held in a cell with two hundred black people, James. I’m asking you – what is going to happen to him? It’s a disaster. Those people will tear him to pieces, James. He’s never even left the country before. It’s the first time he’s ever left South Africa.’

  Nick’s family was falling apart.

  As legal proceedings in Malabo and Harare began to gain pace, an avalanche of documents tumbled into the public domain; the lengthy statements from Simon and Nick provided astonishing insights into the logistics of the planned coup – including detailed accounts of who was involved, where the weapons came from and how the operation was launched.

  The main evidence used to piece together events was Simon’s handwritten thirteen-page confession, which implicated several other co-conspirators. It was dated 9 March 2004 – two days after he was arrested – and was leaked almost immediately, with one page missing. I was given a copy at the end of March by a colleague who was in contact with a source close to Ely Calil, a Lebanese businessman named by Simon as the plot’s facilitator (a claim which Calil denied).

  Although Simon claimed there was no lawyer present when it was written, and that it was extracted under ‘brutal and severe torture and assault for several days’, he would openly admit, much later, that while it was ‘made under duress’ it was nevertheless true.

  According to the confession, the leg of the operation that had got Simon and Nick busted in Harare and Malabo was not the first attempt at pulling off the coup d’état in Equatorial Guinea. The original plan of deploying a seaborne invasion force had been abandoned by August 2003, and it had taken a further six months to get the operation up and running again owing to a lack of ready cash that autumn – a fact Nick had corroborated on the phone the year before.

  In December 2003, the plotters received the money they needed to proceed, and Simon confirmed that Nick’s cover-businesses in the capital, Malabo, appeared to be operating successfully. They were indeed being used for intelligence-gathering and as an insurance policy – ‘if the project did not go ahead’, he wrote, ‘then, hopefully, they would make money’.

  Simon said that the schedule for the operation
was agreed then. ‘A time limit of 16 Feb was set by EC [Ely Calil],’ he wrote. ‘Since we could only get restarted on 6 Jan we had little time.’ The press speculated that the date was dictated by political expediency rather than the exigencies of military preparation: perhaps, it was thought, the plotters had deemed it essential to launch the coup before the forthcoming general election in Spain.

  Severo Moto – the Equatoguinean opposition leader living in exile in Madrid, and identified as the plotter’s man-who-would-be-king – was favoured as a successor to Obiang by the then Spanish right-wing government of José María Aznar, who may have recognised his premiership after the coup. The general election in Spain on 14 March had resulted in the formation of a new left-wing government much less sympathetic to Moto. The Spanish had much to gain from a friendly regime in Malabo: they had been almost entirely excluded from the riches of Equatorial Guinea’s oil boom.

  It was clear to me that the fact that Guinea and Liberia were off the cards as a launch-pad had caused other serious logistical issues. First, now that the operation was based out of South Africa, the mission required planes, not boats, to get the men and weapons to the target. Simon’s statement described how this problem had, in fact, been resolved by Nick’s Pan African Airlines and Trading Company (PANAC) – a joint-venture business with Armengol Nguema (the president’s younger brother and head of national security, who was not involved in the coup) – whose planes were supplied by Merz, the first plotter to die in jail. Second, as the initial press coverage of the arrests had shown, with no Liberian rebels available to act as foot-soldiers, a larger number of black ex-32 Battalion members had been recruited, and in a hurry, from Pomfret – the poverty-stricken, asbestos-riddled wasteland in northern South Africa into which they had been re-settled when their unit was disbanded near the end of the apartheid era. Finally, with no rebel armaments to rely on, Nick needed to get guns – fast.