My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

  Dodson Aviation had a long history of brokering aircraft deals with the US Government. Dodson International Parts SA Limited in South Africa, in its possible earlier incarnation as Dodson Aviation Maintenance and Spare Parts (the former company opened as the latter closed down), was owned by one Colonel Fred Rindel – a former South African Intelligence officer and military attaché to the USA. Among other things, Rindel was busy training Charles Taylor’s Anti-Terrorist Unit in Liberia between 1998 and 2000, two years before Nick and I arrived to film with the rebels. Rindel and Dodson Aviation Maintenance and Spare Parts were both fingered by the United Nations Security Council Panel of Experts’ report on Sierra Leone in December 2000 for breaking international sanctions against Liberia – not least because Rindel was also helping Taylor to train the RUF. The acting manager of Dodson International denied that the two companies were ever connected: the similarity in names was purely a coincidence.

  Pienaar confirmed that an American crew had flown the plane from the US to South Africa – and that the pilots had been provided by a ‘ferry company’ and not Dodson Aviation. My own research verified that the 727 originated in Mena in Arkansas, leaving on 3 or 4 March after having been re-painted in brilliant white and its registration number, N4610, picked out in black lettering. It then, apparently, reappeared in Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados at just after midnight on 6 March. After re-fuelling, it flew on to Sal in Cape Verde at half past six in the morning, and then continued to São Tomé – finally reaching Polokwane Airport in South Africa at twenty to one in the morning on 7 March. Later that day the plane continued to Lanseria and then made the short hop to Wonderboom on that same disastrous Sunday, before leaving again at five minutes to seven in the evening, bound for Harare.

  In the detail of the flight plans was a curious anomaly. Air traffic control at Grantley Adams airport in Barbados recorded the flight’s immediate origin as Hope Air Force Base, North Carolina, USA. There is no Hope Air Force Base in North Carolina. There is, however, a Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina – connected to the United States military complex at Fort Bragg. Pope is, however, no ordinary air force base. It is the operational headquarters for the 427th Special Operations Squadron – which ‘provides Short Takeoff/Landing and tactically qualified crews to support training requirements for the US Army Special Operations Forces community’ – specifically the kind of flight operations that Simon’s specially modified Boeing was designed for. They also provide American Special Forces operators ‘the opportunity to train on various types of aircraft for infiltration and exfiltration that they may encounter in the lesser developed countries in which they provide training’. The very helpful woman in public affairs at Pope Air Force Base confirmed that the airport was strictly closed to civilian air traffic; the only civilian aircraft granted landing rights were those operating under military contract.

  Pope Air Force Base doesn’t just house the 427th, either. Along with Fort Bragg, it’s the home of Delta Force, America’s equivalent of the Special Air Service. According to one military expert, Delta’s mandate involves conducting surgical, rapid-response missions while ‘maintaining the lowest possible profile of U. S. involvement’: in other words, they facilitate or undertake operations that can’t be traced back to the US Government.

  Simon would have been familiar with Delta’s operational procedures. He had an old colleague called Bernie McCabe from his days working with Sandline International who, before becoming Sandline’s US representative, had served in Delta Force for nineteen years. Between 1994 and 1996 McCabe was the unit’s commanding officer. Simon had remarked in a postscript in his emails to Ely Calil in May 2003 that McCabe was then the head of global security for US oil company Marathon. Coincidentally, on the eve of the coup attempt employees from several US oil companies were said to have been confined to their quarters in Malabo.

  Other, independent, sources had also named the pilot Greg Wales described – and suggested possible US military assistance. The United States Government denied any involvement, or foreknowledge, but did admit that an official from the Pentagon, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Foreign Affairs Theresa Whelan, had met Greg Wales on 19 November 2003 at a conference on private military companies. They confirmed that Whelan and Wales had met again at the Pentagon in mid February 2004, the eve of the first coup attempt. The Pentagon said that their conversation ranged over many African issues, but that Wales’s hints were so general (he had ‘mentioned in passing that there might be some trouble brewing in Equatorial Guinea’) that they did not call for any action to be taken. It’s possible that Whelan simply didn’t understand what Wales – a master of circumlocution – was trying to tell her.

  From the same back-room office in my flat where I had called Nick in the aftermath of the arrests, I called Colonel Frank once more for some advice. His opinion was straightforward.

  ‘James, Pope is the centre of US Special Forces activity – Delta, 82nd Airborne, the Rangers, the Green Berets ... you name it, they’re there. That’s where those Green Berets you met in Guinea were based, and it’s where our friends Christians In Action operate out of, too. Anything that you wanted deniability for would run out of Pope. Delta has run specialised operations all over West Africa.’

  As far as Frank was concerned, if you could nail flight N4610 to Pope Air Force Base, you could pin US Government involvement onto the coup. He should have known: he had operated out of Pope and Fort Bragg himself.

  ‘Pope is your smoking gun, but you will never be able to prove it. On the very remote off-chance that Christians In Action were in some way involved with this, they will have launched a major ass-covering operation.’

  Where N4610 went between leaving Mena on 3 or 4 March and arriving in Barbados on 6 March would be practically impossible to verify independently, he cautioned.

  ‘Okay, I understand that, but is there any way this can be chased down?’

  Amid all the smoke and mirrors of the coup, this above all was just too tantalising to let go of without a fight.

  ‘James, I know this is hard for you as a reporter, but there are some questions you don’t want to ask. You don’t want to know the answer.’ Frank assured me that the best advice he could offer was to forget it. ‘You’re chasing shadows, James. It’ll always be the “what if?” It’s over. Concentrate on Nick and the other guys in jail.’

  ‘Okay,’ I agreed, ‘but after everything, are you still saying that the first moment you knew about the coup was when Simon was arrested?’

  ‘Yes. We just didn’t know. The CIA, the DIA, and agencies that you don’t even know exist – we talk to each other. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Fuck it, Frank, I don’t even really know who you work for. Nothing? Absolutely nothing? For God’s sake, even I knew!’

  On the one hand, Frank was adamant he knew nothing; on the other, he was advising me not to chase this down. I felt like banging my head against the wall.

  ‘Nothing. But we did know about the Congo job, and that Nick was trying to get helicopters. We knew that.’

  It was infuriating. Exactly what he knew, and how he’d gathered that information, he wouldn’t say – but clearly the US Intelligence services in Africa had not been quite as surprised as they were pretending.

  For me personally, the consequences of Nick’s African Adventure continued to be far-reaching. At the Channel 4 documentary’s eventual premiere in Soho in March 2005 – shown while Nick spent another interminable night shackled in his cell – I met my future wife.

  At the party afterwards, everyone toasted my ‘escape’, and, one way or another, asked a version of the same question: how could I reconcile my own beliefs to those of my friend the mercenary?

  I struggled to answer then, as I had done when the film was first commissioned. Nick certainly lived by taking risks, steeped in a profession deemed immoral by many, and not without reason. Yet I could not find it within myself to condemn, or even judge, him. With his help, in Libe
ria I had seen a version of the person I wanted to become. Surviving the privations of jungle warfare together tested that person to the moral and physical limit; and it confirmed in me an enduring desire to make my profession one that told the stories of people living in conflict. Nick was my friend when we limped out of the war in Liberia, and he was my friend still. The unpalatable truth is that adversity breeds friendships that transcend moral judgements.

  The film itself had fallen out of favour at Channel 4. After having been signed off for transmission, it was recalled at the last minute without my knowledge, and re-cut. It was deemed that I was too sympathetic to Nick. There was no appetite for the shades of grey that coloured my relationship with him: my voice as narrator was removed from the film, and replaced by that of an actor. The first time I saw the programme was on the night it was broadcast at the screening in Soho.

  In the months that passed afterwards, what I promised myself would never happen came to pass: I moved on.

  I went to war again, and again – in the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a score of other, forgotten conflicts besides; I made dozens of films and started a family.

  During my long absences from home, my daughter would point to the framed photograph of me and Nick on the sideboard and say, ‘Daddy!’ And then, pointing at Nick, she would turn to her mother and ask, ‘Who’s that?’ I hoped one day she would find out: I didn’t just owe my own life to Nick, but hers, too.

  In the years after my film about Nick had been screened, the cast of characters continued to act out their parts in the charade with varying degrees of authenticity and accomplishment. Three years after Kathi and I split up, movie company Paramount Pictures acquired her life rights. Variety, the Hollywood trade magazine, ran the piece: ‘… intelligence operative Kathi Lynn Austin, whose adventures in arms trafficking and terrorism will inspire an action thriller vehicle for Angelina Jolie ... The drama will focus on a fictional arms dealer inspired by [her investigations of] Victor Bout, the shadowy Russian who is considered one of the world’s most prolific dealers in illegal munitions.’ An intelligence operative for whom, exactly, wasn’t divulged.

  Simon had been extradited to Equatorial Guinea, ‘kicking and screaming’, in 2008:bundled into the back of a police truck in secret one night in January 2008, he was unceremoniously and illegally sent to Malabo. Prior to his trial he gave an interview to Channel 4 News. Though his lawyers – and his wife – tried to stop it being broadcast, he insisted the piece be aired. It was eventually shown on 11 March 2008 – Nick’s fifty-second birthday.

  Simon confirmed that his lengthy signed statement drawn up in Zimbabwe, although obtained under duress, was nevertheless true. In chains, and wearing long hair and a grey prison uniform, he accused Ely Calil of being the ‘main man’, the architect of the whole ‘swash-buckling fuck-up’. ‘I was, if you like, the manager’, he claimed, of an operation whose ‘primary motivation was to help, as I saw it, the people of Equatorial Guinea, who were in a lot of trouble.’ Sticking to his line of mercenary-as-liberator, the fact that he stood to preside over a mountain of wonga was of only secondary importance. He also stuck to his guns about the role of South Africa, too. Morgan, he said, had tipped off the Government in Pretoria.

  ‘We were in a desperate situation,’ he said. ‘I knew that he’d basically blown the whistle. And we went ahead because the other indications I was getting – i.e. from the Spanish Government and from the South African Government, and in this case most especially, the South African Government – were that “We want you to go, so go.”’ The British and the Americans, he maintained, had never given him a ‘nod and a wink’.

  Whatever ‘other indications’ Simon thought he was getting were, ultimately, false – despite the fact that in early 2007 charges brought in South Africa against eight of the men freed from Zimbabwe (including Nick’s brother-in-law Errol) were dropped after a short trial. Under cross-examination, the director-general of the South African Secret Service, Hilton ‘Tim’ Dennis, made it clear that there had been contact between the South African Government and Severo Moto prior to the coup attempt. The nature and purpose of the contact were not revealed, though the defendants claimed that they could ‘prove’ they’d been given the ‘green light’ for the operation. The judge threw the case out.

  ‘I blame myself most,’ Simon concluded, echoing what any casual observer would have made of the apparently absurd decision to press on in early March, ‘for simply not saying “cut” two months before we were arrested. That’s what I should have done and there, you know, I was bloody stupid.’

  Mark Thatcher he implicated more deeply than the ex-prime minister’s son’s plea bargain had allowed for: his role was not unwitting, but, he alleged, central. As Simon saw it, Thatcher was part of the team. Mark Thatcher said that his old friend Simon ‘must be frightened and acutely distressed’. He repeated his ‘utmost sympathy’ for him, and confirmed that he had nothing to add to the statements that he gave to the ‘relevant authorities’ in 2004.

  At the time, Calil accused Channel 4 of allowing itself to be used ‘as a propaganda tool for the government of Equatorial Guinea’. He, too, expressed sympathy for Simon, a man who ‘has made many contradictory statements’. ‘I confirm’, a rare statement he released said, ‘that I had no involvement in or responsibility for the alleged coup.’

  In return for giving a star turn as a loquacious canary in court, Obiang did not seek the death penalty for Simon. After a trial every bit as outrageously flawed as Nick’s had been, Simon got thirty years. Just before the trial Obiang triumphed, as predicted, in another absurd presidential election. He won ninety-nine of the hundred seats.

  Then, in July 2008, Calil decided to talk in more detail about the coup plot. It was definitely Simon, he maintained, who was to blame. ‘It was his lack of professionalism, his lack of discretion, his lack of judgement that caused this situation,’ he insisted. Calil also stressed that he personally knew nothing of the details of the planned operation. ‘But yes,’ he accepted, ‘I financed Severo Moto’s political activities, and yes, I introduced Simon Mann to him because of his background in security.’ He also accepted that he had financed plans by Moto to return to his country. Calil stressed that he had supported regime change in Equatorial Guinea – but only ever by ‘democratic change’.

  Calil also maintained that ‘there was no coup plot’. Simon’s version of events was ‘pure fantasy’. There was, though, he said, a scheme agreed between Simon and Severo Moto to fly Moto back to Equatorial Guinea, ‘and to protect him while he was in the country. Simon and his mercenaries were engaged to provide military assistance to Moto.’ Calil mused: ‘Severo’s belief was that if he was protected in his home town, and could remain alive for a few days, a political storm would occur that would sweep away the present regime.’

  Calil went on to outline a preposterous scenario in which Simon was supposed to land in the neighbouring country of Gabon with his mercenary-laden Boeing 727, meet up with Moto, and then cross overland into the continental part of Equatorial Guinea to Moto’s village, where his people would ‘start screaming and demonstrating’ – despite the fact that such a plan could have precipitated a civil war, and that Moto’s village is hundreds of miles away from Bioko, the island part of the country which houses the capital, Malabo, and, of course, President Obiang. Quite why Calil broke cover to posit such an awkward hypothesis is, frankly, mysterious – though anyone able to gainsay his theory with any authority, myself included, was either keeping quiet, or in jail.

  What Ely Calil did verify was that it was he (and Mark Thatcher – who, he also insisted, had nothing to do with any coup plot) whom Simon referred to in his jail correspondence: ‘I accept as regards the letter that I am Smelly and he is Scratcher,’ Calil said, ‘but it’s not that he is implicating us, rather asking friends for help.’

  * * *

  The more time passed, the less people wanted to talk. Everyone wanted to move on, no one wanted to look back �
� no one except Simon, perhaps, who gave another raft of interviews from jail, this time to the BBC. In the filmed conversations at Black Beach prison, he admitted that the original plan to overthrow Obiang had been ‘to sail a ship round and pick up a merry bunch of men off the Liberian coast and arrive here’. He had also considered assassinating the president.

  Corroborating what Greg Wales had told me in London, Simon maintained that the Americans were sympathetic to the operation.

  ‘America wants no part in a coup,’ he said, but claimed that he’d been left with the impression that ‘if there is an orderly and legal regime change, even if it is assisted, if it leads into a free and fair election, provided our assets are left intact, we don’t have a problem’.

  Above all, he maintained that the ‘South Africans’ had endorsed his plan: ‘In fact,’ he said, describing their involvement, ‘I was told to get on with it.’

  From his home buried in the rolling hills of KwaZulu-Natal, Nigel Morgan eventually agreed to talk, by telephone, about his role in his old friend Simon’s downfall. He said that he had been approached by the South African Secret Service in May 2003 to help them investigate Simon’s activities: they thought his renewed acquaintance with Nick and his trips to Conakry were suspicious, and wanted Morgan to find out what Simon was up to. When Johann Smit’s intelligence report confirmed, seven months later, that Nick was recruiting ex-Special Forces operators and deploying them to Equatorial Guinea, Morgan claimed he confronted Simon – who replied that he was only doing legitimate business in Malabo.