My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

  ‘Hello, James,’ he greeted me, as if he’d known me for years. ‘I’d like to talk to you. I’m trying to help the guys in jail.’

  His name was Dries Coetzee; he’d got my number from Nick’s wife. He spoke carefully with a gruff Afrikaans accent. What he needed to say, he wanted to say in person.

  The following morning at eleven o’clock I took myself off reluctantly to see him at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, and braced myself for an interrogation. In his late thirties, Dries looked like an Aryan caricature from a Second World War cartoon. Built like an Olympic shot-putter, he had hands like shovels and a wide-open baby face topped by a frizz of blond hair.

  ‘It’s very good to meet you,’ he said, slowly rising out of his chair both to greet me and size me up. ‘I hear that you and Nick had quite an adventure together.’

  My right hand vanished into his gargantuan grip. I agreed that we had, and that we’d almost shared another, less successful one, too.

  ‘Ja, well, James, that’s why I’m here.’

  His manner was disarmingly direct, his mood affable and his mission clear: he’d come to get money from whom he called ‘the backers’, to help pay for the cost of legal representation, food and other expenses for Simon, Nick and the other imprisoned men. But no one wanted to play ball.

  ‘If there’s anything you can think of that might help,’ he said, ‘we can make a plan. Simon is writing a number of letters from jail, which I have access to. They are very revealing.’

  He said that if I ever decided to make a film about who had betrayed Nick and his men, he would make the letters available to me. It was a potentially explosive offer; I told him I’d have to think carefully about it, and offered to drive him across town for his next meeting.

  As we crossed London, he warmed to his main theme again.

  ‘You know who else refused to help?’

  His eyes were like saucers; he was getting quite angry at the thought of no one stumping up.

  ‘No, who?’ I was only half-listening, busy looking for a parking space.

  ‘Mark Thatcher, that’s who.’

  ‘Mark Thatcher?’

  ‘Ja, that’s right.’

  I stopped the car, and reversed back into a parking bay on Norfolk Place.

  ‘Mark Thatcher is involved in this?’

  ‘Ja. Guess what he fokken said when I rang him and asked for help?’

  Mark Thatcher? It was hard not to laugh. Jesus, no wonder they fucked it up. The accident-prone son of the Iron Lady was certainly not someone you’d rely on for logistical planning: he had, however, participated in the al-Yamamah arms deal between British Aerospace and Saudi Arabia – the largest export deal in British history, worth in excess of £40 billion.

  ‘No, what did Mark Thatcher say when you asked him for help?’ It was like being the straight man in an ’80s stand-up routine.

  ‘He told me to vok off. He said he was watching the Grand Prix, and couldn’t talk. It’s fokken unbelievable. Grand Prix! He told me to call back later. Some fokken friend he turned out to be.’

  Dries and I exchanged numbers. He unfolded himself out of my car, and headed off alone into the Underground. Mark Thatcher. It was preposterous. If he could be involved, so could anyone. For the first time since Nick had been arrested, I felt that familiar surge of adrenaline. We may have been separated by more than 3,000 miles and the thick walls of Black Beach prison, but I was now determined to get to the bottom of the plot.

  As the days after Nick’s arrest turned into weeks, I stayed in close contact with his wife. I travelled to New York to finish Liberia: An Uncivil War, the by-now feature-length documentary that Tim, Jonathan and I had shot in Monrovia. I drank so heavily during the edit that I managed to scare myself into abstinence. By the time the film premiered at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, I had quit drinking entirely, and become teetotal.

  With the film put to bed, a year after we’d escaped over the Mano River, it finally felt as if I could begin to put some distance between me and Liberia. Intrusive images, brutal memories, the guilt of survival – these were the threads from the forest that had been woven into a suit I wore every day. Now I was moving on, or so I hoped.

  Cutting out the drink seemed like a good place to start. Playing the role of a ‘damaged’ war reporter was a seductive proposition: women wanted to rescue me; men who didn’t know better wanted to be me – or at least get drunk with me. Or so I thought. It was ridiculous and deluded and I’d had enough.

  Back in London, I had a series of meetings with Channel 4 which ended in an offer to make films for their international current affairs series Unreported World. My travels with Nick had finally coalesced into a viable, respectable career. I’d thought I’d needed to film the coup to survive professionally – but that was not true. The legacy of working in Liberia was not just a brutal memory of the past, but a positive vision of real work as a filmmaker in the future.

  Meetings at Channel 4 also offered another opportunity, but one which looked more like a poisoned chalice than a trophy commission: they wanted me to deliver a film about Nick and the coup for their Dispatches series. Media interest in the case had snowballed. Letters appealing for help leaked from Simon’s prison cell – drafted by him to his friends ‘Scratcher’ and ‘Smelly’, said to be references to Mark Thatcher and Ely Calil – ended up on the news pages of British papers. Dries had been right. Other alleged contributors to Simon’s regime-change escapade were named, too. These letters, I suspected, came from the stash that Dries had promised me.

  Accepting the commission was morally and legally treacherous. Not only would I be profiting from Nick’s situation as he went on trial for his life, but also anything I did or said in the making of the film could seriously jeopardise his chances of getting out alive. I was reluctant even to refer to Nick as a mercenary, a position that brought me into immediate conflict with the commissioners at Channel 4. What was more, I had promised Nick that I would never name him in connection with my work in Liberia, and had tacitly agreed not to expose his role in the coup: going ahead would mean breaking my word to him. On the face of it, making a film about him was out of the question.

  There were, however, two compelling arguments in favour of accepting Channel 4’s offer: the first was that if I didn’t make the film, then someone else definitely would; and the second was that it would give me a chance to get to the bottom of Nick’s plan. Nick had few enough friends as it was – and it was unlikely that anyone else would make a film that would give him a fair hearing, let alone the benefit of the doubt. I talked it through with his wife, who gave her support, and then called Channel 4 to accept the commission, even though I knew that doing my job as an independent, impartial journalist would be impossible. I explained in no uncertain terms that I would not do or say anything that would further endanger Nick’s life. They agreed.

  At the core of the film – to be directed by my colleague Carla Garapedian – would be a simple question: Nick had told me he didn’t need to go ahead with the operation – so why had he?

  Nick went to trial in the third week of August 2004. Nick’s wife flew to Malabo and sat, shell-shocked, in the court room. It was almost as hard to watch on television. Standing before the court in a blue shirt, shorts and sandals, Nick raised his voice and challenged the judges. He was shackled at the ankles.

  ‘We’ve been chained like wild animals,’ he said, showing his handcuffed wrists to the Bench, ‘we’ve been tortured by the police … we haven’t done anything wrong.’

  If he had, he reasoned, he would have tried to run away. The three judges were impassive. Only one of them had actually practised law; two of them were related to President Obiang. All of the court proceedings were in Spanish – and were either translated badly, or not translated at all. Nick and all his co-accused had enjoyed, in total, less than an hour with their defence lawyer – who was not allowed to offer his clients advice in court. It looked like a foregone conclusion. A
nd then it stopped.

  On 25 August, Mark Thatcher was arrested at his luxury home in Cape Town. The media went into a feeding frenzy, and the Equatoguinean Government postponed Nick’s trial while they sought to gather new evidence and attempt to extradite Thatcher. It looked like a reprieve of sorts. The day after, bank details were leaked showing a payment of $135,000 into Simon’s Logo Logistics company bank account four days before the March attempt crash-landed: it was from one J.H.Archer. Journalists couldn’t believe their luck. Jeffrey Archer’s lawyers said that the disgraced Tory peer ‘had no prior knowledge’ of the coup, and that Archer had ‘never issued a cheque in the sums mentioned’ – neatly sidestepping the fact that the money was paid in by credit transfer. When pressed on that point, Archer replied that he considered ‘the matter closed’.

  The story ran and ran. Greg Wales – one of the men on the Canaries with Severo Moto – admitted to several meetings with Simon Mann and Mark Thatcher prior to everyone’s arrest. Gary Hersham, a British businessman who introduced Simon to Ely Calil, denied any knowledge of the plot though he accepted that he had travelled to Gabon in West Africa with Simon and Greg Wales.

  Two days after Thatcher had been arrested, the two men detained with Simon in Harare – Harry Carlse and Lourens Horn – were acquitted and released. It was expected that they would have to co-operate with the Scorpions once home to avoid a custodial sentence under South Africa’s anti-mercenary laws. On 10 September, Simon was sentenced to seven years in Chikurubi maximum security prison. Errol and the other men got a year apiece, having finally been convicted for breaking immigration laws by entering Zimbabwe illegally on the Boeing 727.

  Before we left to begin filming, I had one last appointment – in the Commonwealth Club on Northumberland Avenue, at the other end of the Mall from Buckingham Palace. A journalist friend who had been busy unearthing the details of the coup plot for the national press had invited me to meet Nigel Morgan – a close friend of both Simon Mann and Mark Thatcher. Morgan had been named by Simon in a letter he’d written from jail asking for help, the same letter that fingered ‘Smelly’ and ‘Scratcher’. He was reported to be deeply implicated in the whole affair – though in what exact capacity was unclear. He was rumoured by the press to be a go-between, linking all the key players of the coup plot with commercial interests and national intelligence agencies. His personal agenda was anyone’s guess.

  As we walked along the wet autumn pavement, I asked my friend who Nigel worked for.

  ‘Well, that’s a good question. He’s independent, a commercial intelligence freelancer. He prepared a file about the coup for a big oil company, and I don’t think it would be a stretch to say he has quite a cosy relationship with the South Africans.’

  We got the to door of the club and stepped into the brightly lit interior.

  ‘Basically, he’s a spook?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, basically, but I’m not sure how formal the connection is – definitely an asset, not an agent. He’s quite the bon viveur, by the way. His detractors call him Captain Pig,’ he smiled at me, ‘and Nosher.’

  We found Morgan – a ruddy-faced man in a Savile Row suit – nursing a gin and tonic upstairs. A genial former officer in the Irish Guards, he looked like he might every bit live up to his mischievous monikers.

  ‘Ah, James,’ he greeted me as we shook hands – him seated on a low couch, me towering above him still wrapped in a fleece and leather jacket – ‘good to meet you.’

  I sat down next to him and ordered drinks while he dug around in his attaché case for a thick file of papers. He turned back one page of type, briefly showing me the short lines of dialogue. The printed black letters revealed details of private telephone conversations I’d had with Nick.

  He folded the paper away carefully before I could fully scrutinise its contents. Sitting back, he raised his glass in welcome, and smiled.

  ‘You had a very lucky escape, young man.’

  16

  LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY

  I pushed open the door to Nick’s office and clicked on the light. The Regimental plaque of 5 Reconnaissance Regiment hung on the wall; a laminated world map covered the desk in front of his computer; filing cabinets jostled for space by the door. I sat down in his chair. Open on the desk was the notebook he’d carried through Liberia, covered in the familiar slanted scrawl of his handwriting. I picked it up like a relic, and leafed through it. Here and there my name appeared, or some detail of our plans. I put it down and felt a terrible sadness. To see the names of the people we’d worked with – Frank and Cobus and Tim – and the names of the towns and villages we’d tramped through and nearly died in brought his absence into sharp relief. It deepened my resolve to find out what Nick had really been up to – whether he had decided to go ahead with the operation, and why. I also hoped to unravel the implications of the arms deal in Zimbabwe. Perhaps, I thought, I might even find something so valuable to Obiang that it might be traded with his henchmen to save Nick.

  It was clear from even a cursory glance through his files that what Nick had been up to, primarily, was making money – or at least trying to. Email correspondence between Nick and Simon charted how the businesses that Nick had begun in Equatorial Guinea were rapidly expanding – along with their budgets. By October 2003, Nick’s monthly operating budget was just shy of $30,000, including his salary of $5,000 a month. Not a fortune, but nice work if you can get it. By the end of January 2004, that budget had jumped to more than $80,000.

  The company they had set up on 25 August 2003 as a vehicle for their investments in Equatorial Guinea – Triple Option Trading – was operating as a genuine and viable business concern, as well as a front-organisation for the coup. Statements showed that Simon’s bank accounts were paying for it. The branch of the company incorporated in Equatorial Guinea did so as a joint venture with Armengol, the president’s brother, who apparently signed up in good faith, ignorant of their plans.

  There were thousands of sheets of paper chronicling Nick’s business plans – dozens of files to read and digest. In among all the breakdowns of day-to-day running costs and emails about getting different projects up and running, details about high-value items indispensable to regime change caught my eye.

  On 5 February 2004, the company belonging to Gerhard Merz – the German later tortured to death – invoiced Triple Option to the tune of $124,000 for the Antonov and Ilyushin cargo planes and crews; six days later, a $20,000 invoice for ‘local cars’ was raised. With ground and air transportation for the men arranged, the first coup attempt was launched eight days later. The invoice was marked ‘Simon AC Monthly’ in Nick’s handwriting. On 1 December 2003, Simon guaranteed Nick $2 million for Triple Option Trading. Between 5 January and 2 March, Nick’s company received a total of $220,000 from Simon’s companies: Nick was in too deep to bail out.

  * * *

  ‘I’m surprised you’re still alive.’

  Nick’s business partner, Henri van der Westhuizen, sat across the table from me at Nino’s coffee bar in Centurion, a small town outside the eastern suburbs of Pretoria. Named in Simon’s confession as the man that Nick had first turned to for weapons, I had contacted Henri as soon as I arrived in South Africa. If anyone could help piece together the puzzle of the coup, it was him. A small man with dark wavy hair and a quick, nervous smile, Henri didn’t look like an assassin – though that’s what he once had been. He still talked like one, though. His welcome note had been delivered before I’d even managed to sit down.

  Research in London had turned up some of the details of Henri’s past. The evidence he gave at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – an amnesty-granting body set up by Mandela’s government to oversee a national process of inquiry and healing – was a matter of public record. Henri was a member of the Civil Cooperation Bureau – the South African Army’s death squad that was run out of Special Forces headquarters.

  Henri was responsible for blowing up the same ANC legal activist in Maputo whose
attempted assassination had put George Alerson (now in jail with Nick) behind bars in Mozambique. He also helped establish a target-development group that worked closely with the apartheid government’s Counter-revolutionary Intelligence Target Centre. They decided which ANC activists should be assassinated, and provided the information necessary to make sure they were eliminated – often by covert military action undertaken by, amongst other units, Reconnaissance Commandos. Henri was granted amnesty not only for the bombings, but also for gun-running into South Africa’s black Ciskei homeland, where he admitted helping to facilitate a coup d’état.

  He seemed so mild-mannered and approachable that it was hard to connect the words he spoke with the relaxed countenance he projected.

  ‘Really?’ I asked him. ‘Is it dangerous for me to investigate this?’

  He beckoned over a waitress and looked at me blankly.

  ‘Yes, it is. Look, you might be all right. Nick is very respected, and it’s well known what you two went through in Liberia together …’ He paused to make sure I was following what he said. ‘But if you dig deep enough, you’re going to start upsetting people. Some of these people are powerful people, and they’ll protect their interests.’

  Had anyone else warned me, I would have shrugged it off: but target-identification had been Henri’s stock-in-trade. If there was one thing he knew about, it was bumping people off. I was fairly sure that he was helping me, and not threatening me.

  The waitress took our order for coffee and pastries and sauntered back to the till.

  ‘Is there anyone in particular I need to worry about?’

  ‘No, not a named individual.’ His face was impassive. Then he removed his brown leather jacket and leaned over the table. ‘Just be careful. I’ll do what I can to assist you. Now, what was it that you wanted to know?’