The second political document, entitled ‘Bight of Benin Company’, was apparently drawn up in January 2004 – at about the time when Nick was trying (and failing) to get weapons from Uganda, and expressing his reservations about the wisdom of the operation to me. A version of the Bight of Benin briefing had turned up in Simon’s office in South Africa. The author warns that the main problem faced by the plotters is the threat arising from ‘bad behaviour; disloyalty; rampant individual greed; irrational behaviour; back-stabbing; bum-fucking and similar ungentlemanly activities’ within the conspirators’ own ranks. Mark Thatcher’s involvement, for example, was to be kept strictly confidential.
The problem of how to deal with Moto once he was in charge was also an issue, as was the role of the United States Government and, in particular, the Nigerians – who, it was feared, may have invaded Equatorial Guinea to reduce it to ‘vassal status’. Intriguingly, tied into the perceived threat from Nigeria, one of the plotters’ apparent main concerns expressed in the document was the risk that ‘E. K.’ (presumably Ely Calil – sometimes spelled ‘Khalil’) himself might pose to their plans. If Calil was the funder and instigator of the operation that Simon had planned, it would have been reasonable to expect that they were all singing from the same hymn sheet. Not so. The author of this briefing fears that Calil may have ulterior motives and, apart from possibly being ‘part of the usual Lebo conspiracy (which will involve money-laundering, diamond trading, etc) creating problems with the outside world’, he might ultimately be working for ‘the Nigerians or a faction of them, a possible view being to destabilise EG, grab some of its oil acreage; [and] shift a lot of oil revenue to Nig’.
The other threat the plotters had identified was Nick. It was feared he ‘may be working for, or now or later may be bought, pressurised or threatened by Obiang’. They also worried that he ‘may have his own plan’. The ways by which to limit Nick’s powers were laid out starkly: Triple Option Trading’s contracts were all to be routed through a company controlled by the conspirators, and the mercenaries and security contractors employed after the ‘event’ should be of the plotters’ choosing – not Nick’s. It seemed inevitable that Nick would have known the other plotters’ propensity for back-stabbing: although he stood to gain a million dollars from facilitating the coup in Malabo, his legitimate contracts were likely on course to earn him that much, anyway. What I could only guess at was whether Nick realised that they thought he might actually be working with Obiang.
When we’d sat and first discussed the coup in Conakry fifteen months before, I’d imagined the be-all and end-all of it as a dramatic fire-fight and emblematic victory parade; I’d imagined breaking the story and, later, exposing the inner workings of the operation. What I hadn’t imagined was the sheer scale of what Simon had been planning. I doubted that Nick knew, either. Turning Equatorial Guinea into ‘the Switzerland of Africa’ and removing a despicable tyrant from office seemed, on the face of it, like a reasonable, and possibly even justifiable, objective – even if a few foreigners made some money in the process. What was not reasonable, and certainly not moral, was the hegemony that the plotters’ manifesto sought to visit upon the country. By forming a company to run Equatorial Guinea, in much the same way as the British had initially ruled India through the aegis of the East India Company, what the conspirators sought to achieve was the straightforward contractual control of an independent nation state. They didn’t want to remove Obiang and install Moto – they actually wanted to own Equatorial Guinea outright. The language of their document is casually racist; their agenda explicitly colonial. Simon may have pleaded in his confession that he was trying to help the ‘cause’ of the ‘good and honest’ Severo Moto – but his plan was, at root, dishonest and avaricious.
Despite the clarity with which these documents exposed the moral bankruptcy of the plotters, my natural objections to the real intentions of the operation did not lead me to condemn Nick himself. It did seem unlikely that he would have known any of the detail in the new documents that had been unearthed: indeed, the plotters clearly distrusted him, and planned to move against him, too. Moreover, my friendship with Nick had profoundly compromised my personal judgement in relation to the coup – to the extent that my fears in London had been correct: in the face of Nick’s possible death sentence, it was, as a journalist, simply not possible for me to be objective or impartial.
It was time for Carla and I to broaden the story. In the third week of October 2004, seven months after Simon had been arrested, I touched down at Harare International Airport. It was the first time I’d been back to Zimbabwe since working there as a news producer covering the 2001 presidential election for the BBC. I wanted to see if following Nick’s trail shed any light on why, and how, the operation had been compromised.
As the plane turned into its parking stand, the mercenaries’ stranded Boeing 727 swung into view on the apron. The sight of the dirty white fuselage made my stomach contract. Just being collared as an unaccredited journalist carried a two-year jail term there. If the authorities linked me to Simon, I could expect much worse.
We decided to start by visiting Dumisani Muleya, one of the few independent journalists still working in Zimbabwe. He claimed to have the inside scoop on the arms deal. In the shadow of the ruling party’s headquarters, we sat down in a stuffy conference room in the building where he tried to continue reporting the news. He was hanging on by his fingertips: earlier that year he’d been arrested and charged with criminal defamation – his reward for doing his job, and for angering the Government. Whatever strictures I operated under, Muleya’s were much more severe.
‘Good afternoon,’ he greeted us, as Carla unpacked the camera from an innocuous shopping bag. ‘I think you’ve made it without any problems so far. That’s a good start.’
We shook hands and briefly lamented the weather – despite the sweltering heat, he was smartly turned out for the camera, in a shirt and tie – before he fanned a folio of signed ZDI contracts across the end of the board table to which we’d drawn up our chairs.
Nick had intended for his men to be well equipped. Annotated in his characteristic calligraphy, the paperwork that Carla was busy filming did not hint at political manoeuvrings in public-school slang – it spoke of cold, military facts. The mercenaries would have been hitting Equatorial Guinea with an impressive arsenal that comprised ten Browning 9mm pistols; sixty-one AK-47s; twenty PKM belt-fed machine guns; ten rocket-propelled grenade launchers; two 60mm mortars; one hundred and fifty offensive hand grenades; and twenty flares. In addition, Nick had requested more than 75,000 rounds of ammunition, eighty mortar bombs and a hundred rocket-propelled grenade warheads.
The total cost of the Equatorial Guinea coup weapons was fractionally over $80,000 – and they weighed in at more than four metric tons. At the top of the quotation, Nick had written the name of the registration of the cargo plane that would make the pick-up from Equatorial Guinea (AN12 EK-11351) and the name of the hapless Armenian pilot, Captain Ashot Karapetyan, who had ended up in Black Beach prison with Nick. The second order – signed by Nick alone – was for six tons of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades. Destined for the rebels in Congo’s Katanga province, it cost more than $100,000.
I picked up the quotation for the rebels’ ammunition.
‘So Nick actually said, “We want these weapons to give to rebels in the Congo”?’
The criminality of Mugabe’s regime notwithstanding, it was still breathtaking that the state-owned arms supplier would openly discuss arming dissident rebel groups.
‘Yes,’ Muleya replied, dabbing the sweat from his high forehead.
That, according to him, had been when the problems started.
‘Simon Mann mentioned a different reason, which was “We’re going to protect a mine.”’
Nick, meanwhile, had mentioned the rebels, which apparently made the Government very uncomfortable. I looked at the paperwork carefully, and asked if the problem was the Congo rebels
per se, or just that they hadn’t stuck to the same story. It was, he insisted, the Katanga connection.
‘Nick apparently thought that it would not matter, that they didn’t care what the weapons were used for. He underestimated the possible negative reaction from the Government in Zimbabwe.’
Heavily involved in extremely profitable mining operations in the Congo – where their troops had been deployed after intervening in Congo’s civil war – the Zimbabwean Government relied increasingly on profiteering in Congo. What they needed in order to keep a steady flow of diamonds, timber and gold pouring south was a friendly regime in Kinshasa, the capital, and stability in the jungle – not a rebel insurgency that would threaten both. Robert Mugabe and Joseph Kabila (the president of Congo) were close allies. Colonel Dube, the head of ZDI, would, as a matter of routine, Muleya told me, report his deals directly to the Zimbabwe Central Intelligence Organisation. It seemed to Muleya that the chances of the CIO signing off on supplying the enemies of Mugabe’s own best Congolese friend were remote in the extreme. So either Nick had made a serious miscalculation in sourcing bullets for the rebels through ZDI, or he had pulled it off against the odds and struck a private deal with Colonel Dube, guaranteeing the ZDI chief’s silence with the valuable intelligence rewards the Katangese job promised.
We shook hands and made arrangements for the paperwork to be shipped to London discreetly. Muleya slipped back to his bureau and Carla and I drove across town. I had a letter to deliver, and wanted to hand it over as quickly as possible.
Simon’s lawyer, Jonathan Samukange, didn’t ask to see our press passes as we filed into his office in downtown Harare. Immaculately turned out in smart trousers buckled with a gold clasp and an open-necked shirt that revealed a gold chain, Samukange was a small, charismatic man who spoke in flamboyantly accented Zimbabwean English. He warmed to the camera immediately – adjusting his cufflinks and leaning back in his chair. The rebels in Katanga were, he believed, the cause of everyone’s downfall.
‘If Nick hadn’t mentioned the DRC rebel movement,’ I pressed him, ‘do you think the deal would have gone ahead as planned?’
Turning to face me, Samukange, too, laid the blame for Simon’s arrest squarely on Nick’s shoulders.
‘Yes. Yes,’ he replied, underlining his certainty with short, sharp nods of the head. ‘The only unfortunate statement which he made was that he said, “I’m going to supply the rebels in the DRC.” The arrest was never designed, and this is on record, an affidavit,’ he continued, wagging his right finger at me, ‘it was never designed to stop them going to Equatorial Guinea.’
By now he was rocking from side to side, both index fingers aimed at me like the barrels of fleshy brown six-guns.
‘It was to stop them from supplying rebels in DRC.’
‘So Nick du Toit was to blame for the operation not succeeding?’
‘Yes, definitely, definitely. Yes, definitely. If he had not issued that statement, Simon Mann would not be sitting in Chikurubi.’
I was still unconvinced. The governments in Harare and Malabo had both publicly credited the South Africans with the tip-off that led to Simon and Nick’s buccaneers being busted: whether that was genuine gratitude, or part of a pre-arranged script, was impossible to tell. I changed the subject and asked Samukange what Simon’s chances were of an early release. He thought it was possible. Then I handed him the letter.
‘Do you think that you would be able to deliver this to Simon, please? It’s not signed, as such, but he’ll know who it’s from.’
The six sides of writing paper set out the current state of affairs, namely: that the Equatoguinean Government’s civil case against Simon and the other plotters looked doomed to fail; that Crause Steyl, the pilot who was to have flown Severo Moto, Greg Wales and the others gathered in the Canary Islands into Malabo, had struck a plea bargain with the Scorpions; and that, in Black Beach, Nick was getting the shit kicked out of him. In the final paragraph I asked if there was any message Simon wanted to convey to the outside world. Samukange agreed that he would see it into Simon’s hands – and suggested I call back in a few days to hear his response.
As Carla and I drove back to the hotel, I added up the balance sheet of the investigation so far. I couldn’t be certain that Nick had definitely planned to go ahead with the operation – but it seemed very likely that he had. Either he was bullied into it (unlikely), or, more plausibly, he figured it was a win/win situation: if the coup worked – he was made; if it didn’t – he had hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of investment into his businesses in Equatorial Guinea, which might end up being as profitable in the long run. The fact that he possessed no weapons, and no incriminating paperwork, meant he’d either seen no reason to run when Simon was arrested (quite possibly because he couldn’t face losing his investments) or thought that trying to leave would look like an admission of guilt, and had stayed reluctantly.
The question now was: where did the information come from that led to the arrests? There was an array of possibilities. The Zimbabweans could have busted Simon all by themselves because they wanted to stop his Katanga project; then again, the Equatoguineans could have blown the whistle after rumbling Nick and connecting him to Simon. Alternatively, the South Africans may have tipped off the Zimbabweans, as many already believed. If the South Africans gave the nod to the Zimbabweans – which was most likely – the question in turn was: where had their information come from? Nick himself, Nigel Morgan, or another intelligence leak? The fact that the entire operation had been repeated sixteen days after the initial failure in Kolwezi gave plenty of scope for operational security to be breached at any number of points.
Despite the permutations, visiting Harare had left me with the bitter taste of an unpalatable possibility: Nick just might have fucked it up.
17
CONGO MERCENARY
I re-trod the footsteps of the coup-plotters around South Africa with Carla. In Pomfret, the scorching, asbestos-ridden town that many 32 Battalion fighters had ended up in, the families of the accused wanted Simon’s scalp for getting their loved ones in trouble; in Cape Town, we filmed the luxury playground that Simon (and, indeed, some members of the Equatoguinean ruling family) called home; in Pretoria, we visited Wonderboom Airport, and found one of the DC-3s used in the 19 February operation still sitting outside the hangar of its owners: Dodson International Parts SA Limited.
In Nick’s office, I fanned out more sheaves of paper across the floor and exhumed the evidence that he and Simon left buried in their correspondence. Carla was not there to film me; this was an unrecorded, private act. What I wanted was to hear Nick’s voice; what I hoped to find was an explanation – something that would exonerate him from the growing accusations of incompetence. I was looking for details of other people involved in the plot – and something, anything, about the Congo operation.
Over the next few hours, as I trawled through hundreds of files and documents, I discovered three key facts. The first was that Ely Calil, the Lebanese businessman whom Simon had implicated in his confession and letters from jail, featured prominently in documents relating to Nick and Simon’s project in Equatorial Guinea.
A thick blue folder named ‘Toothpick’, which Nick’s wife said Simon had left in Nick’s office one day, contained a handwritten compliments slip. It read: ‘Simon, Best regards, Ely Calil.’ There followed three emails dated 14 and 15 May 2003 under the subject heading, ‘Thoughts re FP and EG’. In them, Simon presents Calil with two different options for a planned ‘Fishery Protection’ operation in Equatorial Guinea. In fact, the content of the emails concerns Nigeria, the oil industry and different ways of ultimately deploying mobile armed personnel into Equatorial Guinea’s territorial waters. In two dense pages of type about the multi-million-dollar proposal, the word ‘fish’ does not appear once.
Simon proposes two options, including ‘the immediate deployment of an off shore asset protection force … plus the immediate deployment of a Guard
Ship … armed and manned with a Quick Reaction Force and a helicopter’, and signs off with the question: ‘What do you think?’
Calil’s reply is short. He asks Simon to brief him on the Nigerians, and gives a one-line answer to Simon’s question about the best way to go about securing a ‘fishery protection’ contract: ‘I would go for Option 1: get our foot in the door and start proposing extras …’ The correspondence ends with Simon reminding Calil that he’ll be in Madrid on Sunday – and that he’ll see him then.
Whatever the two men were really discussing, exactly two weeks after that email was sent Nick had sat with me in Conakry explaining how a force of international mercenaries would board a boat from Guinea Conakry and set sail for their African Switzerland, where the president wasn’t playing ball with the oil companies. A month later, just before we met up with Simon, Nick had explained how they were now planning to try and get a helicopter gunship onto that boat, too.
The second key fact was that Guinea Conakry and Liberia were definitely intended to be used as bases from which to launch the coup designed to winkle President Obiang out of his palace. It also contained a letter of invitation for Simon to study a mining project from a company in Guinea Conakry, dated three weeks after his planned meeting in Madrid with Calil. On the same day, 8 June, Nick paid South African company Anscad Logistics for a large order of non-lethal military equipment (very similar to that found on the Boeing 727 in Harare) to be delivered to a company called TTK – also in Conakry. Then – on the day when General Cobra reached Tubmanburg with a fresh delivery of weapons by boat from Guinea, and Nick arrived back in Conakry – TTK issued three letters awarding Nick and Simon bogus mining-security contracts. Their purpose was to support Simon’s application for a visa, and to facilitate the importation of military equipment.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 36
